¶ In the end, Prussian troops put down the patriots.
¶ In ’48, all kings were under suspicion; it made no difference whether the king was a good king or a bad king; a king was a king, and all kings were bad.
The younger generation, especially became morbid over the word “Liberty!” What it really meant, in ’48, was that human nature should restrain itself, in order that all men might, immediately, enter into so-called God-given political rights.
The situation was somewhat analogous to that created after the Civil War, in the United States. Certain political fanatics, weeping over the Negroes, now demanded universal suffrage, literally, for the slaves, and in secret saw that by controlling the South, a “Black Republic” might be set up, side by side with our “White Republic.”
¶ Fraternity and equality—that was the cry in ’48—glossed over by politico-religious glamour, expressed in the idea that men “ought” do thus and so, and therefore “a people’s king” was in order. The people were to crown themselves.
For a thousand years the accepted political doctrine had been that kings held office by Divine-right, but now orators of the day harangued mobs proclaiming the literal belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
While, thus, the new apostles ridiculed the old idea of Divine-right, as attached to the acts of monarch, leaders of the people saw no inconsistency in asserting attributes of political divinity in the doings of the common people. Thus, a species of nebulous politico-religious humanism was pictured as the highest expression of political philosophy.
The individual wished to come into his own and the quicker the better. Reformers shocked landed proprietors, titled folk and office-holders under kings, by demanding unconditional surrender of the machinery of government; zealots urged revolts against all manner of constituted authority. The point was to gain for the barber, the tailor, the shoemaker and the blacksmith more life, more political experience, more freedom of choice—and right on the next tick of the clock!
¶ There is this about it: that the Frankfort Convention offered to William IV the “People’s Crown” as a direct symbol of belief in political idealism, not necessarily, however, the political idealism that tolerates a king but instead uses him as a popular signboard.