With such an opening, a splendid career in the service of courts and kings seemed to be reserved for him. His family connexions, his great abilities, and his unusual acquirements at so early an age guaranteed to him quick promotion, with reward and worldly honour. But to figure in the service of the oppressors of the people—to waste in luxurious trifling the resources of a peasantry, supplied by them only at the cost of a life-time of painful destitution, to support the selfish greed and vain ostentation of the Jew—such was not the career which could stimulate the ambition of Struve. The conviction that this was not his proper destiny grew stronger in him, and he soon abandoned his diplomatic position and Oldenberg at the same time. Without wealth or friends, at variance with his relatives, who could not appreciate his higher aims, he settled himself in Göttingen (1831), and in the following year in Jena. His attempts to obtain fixed employment as professor or teacher, or as editor of a newspaper, long proved unsuccessful, for independent and honest thought, never anywhere greatly in esteem, at that time in Germany was in especial disfavour with all who, directly or indirectly, were under court influences. Yet the three years which he lived in Göttingen and Jena supplied him with varied and useful experiences.
In 1833 he went to Karlsruhe. After years of long patience and effort, he at length effected his object (to gain a position which should make it possible for him to carry out his schemes of usefulness for his fellow-beings), and, at the end of 1836, he obtained the office of Obergerichts-Advocat in Mannheim. This position gave leisure and opportunity for the prosecution of his various scientific and philosophic pursuits, and to engage in literary undertakings. He founded periodicals and delivered lectures, the constant aim of which was the improvement of the world around him. At this period he wrote his philosophic romance, Mandaras’ Wanderungen (“The Wanderings of Mandaras”), through which he conveys distasteful truths in accordance with the principles of Tasso.[271]
Struve’s active political life began in 1845. In that year were published Briefwechsel zwischen einen ehemaligen and einen jetzigen Diplomaten,(“Correspondence between an Old and a Modern Diplomatist”), which was soon followed by his Oeffentliches Recht des Deutschen Bundes (“Public Rights of the German Federation”) and his Kritische Geschichte des Allgemeinen Staats-Rechts (“Critical History of the Common Law of Nations”). In the same year he undertook the editorship of the Mannheimer Journal, in which he boldly fought the battles of political and social reform. He was several times condemned to imprisonment, as well as to payment of fines; but, undeterred by such persecution, the champion of the oppressed succeeded in worsting most of his powerful enemies.
In the beginning of 1847 he founded a weekly periodical, the Deutscher Zuschauer (“The German Spectator”), in which, without actually adopting the invidious names, he maintained in their fullest extent the principles of Freedom and Fraternity; and it was chiefly by the efforts of Struve that the great popular demonstration at Oldenberg of September 12, 1847, took place, which formulated what was afterwards known as the “Demands of the People.” The public meeting, assembled at the same town March 9, 1848, which was attended by 25,000 persons, and which, without committing itself to the adoption of the term “republican,” yet proclaimed the inherent Rights of the People, was also mainly the work of the indefatigable Struve. He took part, too, in the opening of the Parliament at Frankfurt. His principal production at this time was Grundzüge der Staats-Wischenschaft (“Outlines of Political Science”). This book, inspired by the movement for freedom which was then agitating, but, as it proved, for the most part ineffectually, a large part of Europe, is not without significance in the education of the community for higher political conceptions. Struve and F. Hecker took a leading part in the democratic movements in Baden. These attempts failing, after a short residence in Paris, he settled near Basel (Basle). There he published his Grundrechte des Deutschen Volkes (“Fundamental Rights of the German People”), and, in association with Heinzen, a Plan für Revolutionierung und Republikanisierung Deutschlands. The earnest and noble convictions apparent in all the writings of the author, and the unmistakable purity of his aims, forced from the more candid of the opponents of his political creed recognition and high respect. Nevertheless, he narrowly escaped legal assassination and the fusillades of the Kriegsgericht or Military Tribunal.
Later the unsuccessful lover of his country sought refuge in England, and from thence proceeded to the United States (1850). Upon the breaking out of the desperate struggle between the North and South, he threw in his lot with the former, and took part in several battles. In America he wrote his historical work Weltgeschichte (12 vols.) and, amongst others, Abeilard und Heloise. In 1861 he returned to Europe, and, at different periods, wrote two of his most important books, Pflanzenkost, die Grundlage einer Neuen Weltanschauung (“Vegetable Diet, the Foundation of a New World-View”), and Das Seelenleben, oder die Naturgeschichte des Menschen (“The Spiritual Life, or the Natural History of Man”), in both of which he earnestly insists, not only upon the vast and incalculable suffering inflicted, in the most barbarous manner, upon the victims of the Table, but, further, upon the demoralising influence of living by pain and slaughter:—
“The thoughts and feelings which the food we partake of provokes are not remarked in common life, but they, nevertheless, have their significance. A man who daily sees Cows and Calves slaughtered, or who kills them himself, Hogs ‘stuck,’ Hens plucked, or Geese roasted alive, &c., cannot possibly retain any true feeling for the sufferings of his own species. He becomes hardened to them by witnessing the struggles of other animals as they are being driven by the butcher, the groans of the dying Ox, or the screams of the bleeding Hog, with indifference.... Nay, he may come even to find a devilish pleasure in seeing beings tortured and killed, or in actually slaughtering them himself....
“But even those who take no part in killing, nay, do not even see it, are conscious that the flesh-dishes upon their tables come from the Shambles, and that their feasting and the suffering of others are in intimate connexion. Doubtless, the majority of flesh-eaters do not reflect upon the manner in which this food comes to them, but this thoughtlessness, far from being a virtue, is the parent of many vices.... How very different are the thoughts and sentiments produced by the non-flesh diet!”[272]
The last period of his life was passed in Wien (Vienna), and in that city his beneficently-active career closed in August, 1870. His last broken words to his wife, some hours before his end, were, “I must leave the world ... this war ... this conflict!” With the life of Gustav Struve was extinguished that of one of the noblest soldiers of the Cross of Humanity. His memory will always be held in high honour wherever justice, philanthropy, and humane feeling are in esteem.
In Mandaras’ Wanderungen, of a different inspiration from that of ordinary fiction, and which is full of refinement of thought and feeling, are vividly represented the repugnance of a cultivated Hindu when brought, for the first time, into contact with the barbarisms of European civilisation. To few of our English readers, it is presumable, is this charming story known; and an outline of its principal incidents will not be supererogatory here.
The hero, a young Hindu, whose home is in one of the secluded valleys of the Himalaya, urged by the solicitude of the father of his betrothed, who wishes to prove him by contact with so different a world, sets out on a course of travel in Europe. The story opens with the arrival of his ship at Leftheim (Livorno) on the Italian coast. Mandaras has no sooner landed than he is accosted by two clerics (ordensgeistliche), who wish to acquire the honour and glory of making a convert. But, unhappily for their success, like his predecessor Amabed, he had already on his voyage discovered that the religion of the people, among whom he was destined to reside, did not exclude certain horrible barbarisms hitherto unknown to him in his own unchristian land:—