THE EXCHANGE AND FREDERICK’S BRIDGE, BERLIN.
Kossuth carried in the Diet at Pesth an address to the Emperor Ferdinand, demanding a national Government, from which the foreign—i.e., the German—element was to be eliminated. Feeble efforts at repression in Vienna ended in the concession of a Free Press, a National Guard, and a Liberal Constitution for the Empire.
It almost seemed as if the Revolution of ’48 had come to enforce the views which the Queen and Prince Albert had in vain impressed on their German relatives. Those views were to the effect that the time had arrived when the Princes of the Empire ought, as a matter of grace, to grant constitutional liberties to their subjects. But their Teutonic Majesties and Serenities had lest their chance of conceding by policy what Revolution now extorted from
THE KING OF PRUSSIA ADDRESSING THE BERLINERS. ([See p. 346.])
them by force. The movement began in Baden, where, on the 29th of February, the Grand Duke was compelled to grant a Free Press, a National Guard, and Trial by Jury to his subjects. It spread fast through the minor States. In Munich it ended in the abdication of the King on the 21st of March. In the Odenwald the peasants sacked the baronial castles, and a servile war seemed imminent, even in Coburg. The Queen was therefore excited by every fresh outbreak, her only consolation being that Belgium—her uncle’s kingdom—remained tranquil. The Prince Hohenlohe, the husband of her half-sister, and her half-brother, the Prince of Leiningen, were simply ruined. “All minds,” writes the Princess Hohenlohe to the Queen, “are on the stretch.... Never was such a state of lawless vagabondage as there is now all over Germany, more or less. At all hours of the day young men are walking about the streets doing nothing.” Business was at a standstill: there was neither buying nor selling, marrying nor giving in marriage; and the Queen’s half-sister, in another letter, speaking of herself and her illustrious family, remarks, piteously:—“We are undone, and must begin a new existence of privations.”