In Prussia, a communication was made on the 28th of April by the King to the Chambers, transmitting a bill to abolish the articles of the Constitution and regulate the organization of the peerage. In the First Chamber it was referred to the existing committee on the constitution of the body concerned. In the Second Chamber a committee was appointed to consider the measure. The minister desired that the matter might be quickly dispatched. In the same sitting of the 28th, the Second Chamber came to two other important votes. It rejected, by a majority of 186 to 82, the resolution of the First Chamber, and which, dividing the budget of ordinary and extraordinary expenses, decided that the first should be no longer fixed annually, but once for all, and that no future modification should take place, except by a law. It also rejected, by 225 to 57, another decision of the First Chamber, by which it had declared, in opposition to the Constitution, that it could vote the budget, article by article, like the Second Chamber.
In Tuscany a decree of the Grand Duke has abolished the Constitution and Civic Guard, and constituted the government on the same basis as before 1848. The ministers are henceforward responsible to the Grand Duke; the Council of State is separated from that of the Ministers; the communal law of 1849 and the law on the press are to be revised.
The Danish question has been settled in London, by conferences of the representatives of the several powers concerned. Prince Christian of Glucksberg is to succeed to the crown on the death of the present King and his brother, both of whom are childless.
In Turkey all differences with Egypt have been adjusted. Fuad-Effendi, it is announced by the Paris Presse, justifying all the hopes which his mission had given birth to, has come to a complete understanding with the Egyptian government, whose good intentions and perfect fair dealing he admits. The Viceroy accepts the code with the modifications called for by the state of the country, and which the Turco-Egyptian Commissioners had already fixed in their conferences at Constantinople. On its side, the Porte accords to the Viceroy the right of applying the punishment of death during seven years, without reference to the divan.
Editor's Table.
The birth-day of a nation is not merely a figurative expression. Nations are born as well as men. The very etymology of the word implies as much. Social compacts may be declarative of their independence, or definitive of their existence, but do not create them. In truth, all such compacts and conventions do in themselves imply a previous natural growth or organization lying necessarily still farther back, as the ground of any legitimacy they may possess. There can be no con-vening unless there is something to determine, a priori, who shall come together, and how they shall come together—as representatives of what principals—as parts of what ascertained whole—with what powers, on what terms, and for what ends. There can no more be an artificial nation than an artificial language. Aside from other influences, all attempts of the kind must be as abortive in politics as they have ever been in philology. Nations are not manufactured, either to order or otherwise, but born—born of other nations, and nurtured in those peculiar arrangements of God's providence which are expressly adapted to such a result. The analogy between them and individuals may be traced to almost any extent. They have, in general, some one event in which there may be discovered the conceptive principle, or principium, of their national life. They have their embryo or formative period. They have their birth, or the time of their complete separation from the maternal nationality to which they were most nearly and dependently united. They have their struggling infancy—their youth—their growth—their heroic period—their iron age of hardship and utility—their manhood—their silver age of luxury and refinement—their golden age of art and science and literature—their acme—their decline—their decay—their final extinction, or else their dissolution into those fragmentary organisms from which spring up again the elements or seeds of future nationalities.
We need not trace our own history through each of these periods. The incipient stages have all been ours, although, in consequence of a more healthy and vigorous maternity, we have passed through them with a rapidity of which the previous annals of the world present no examples. Less than a century has elapsed since that birth, whose festive natal day is presented in the calendar of the present month, and yet we are already approaching the season of manhood. We have passed that proud period which never comes but once in a nation's life, although it may be succeeded by others far surpassing it in what may be esteemed the more substantial elements of national wealth and national prosperity. Almost every state has had its heroic age. We too have had ours, and we may justly boast of it as one equaling in interest and grandeur any similar period in the annals of Greece and Rome—as one which would not shrink from a comparison with the chivalrous youth of any of the nations of modern Europe. It is the unselfish age, or rather, the time when the self-consciousness, both individual and national, is lost in some strong and all-absorbing emotion—when a strange elevation of feeling and dignity of action are imparted to human nature, and men act from motives which seem unnatural and incredible to the more calculating and selfish temperaments of succeeding times. It is a period which seems designed by Providence, not for itself only, or the great effects of which it is the immediate cause, but for its influence upon the whole after-current of the national existence. The strong remembrance of it becomes a part of the national life; it enters into its most common and constant thinking, gives a peculiar direction to its feeling; it imparts a peculiar character to its subsequent action; it makes its whole historical being very different from what it would have been had there been no such epic commencement, no such superhuman or heroic birth. It furnishes a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to reinvigorate from time to time the national virtue when impaired, as it ever is, by the factious, and selfish, and unheroic temper produced by subsequent days of merely economical or utilitarian prosperity.
This heroic age must pass away. It is sustained, while it lasts, by special influences which can not have place in the common life and ordinary work of humanity. Its continuance, therefore, would be inconsistent with other benefits and other improvements of a more sober or less exciting kind, but which, nevertheless, belong to the proper development of the state. The deep effects, however, still remain. It inspires the poet and the orator. It furnishes the historian with his richest page. It tinges the whole current of the national literature. In fact, there can be no such thing as a national literature, in its truest sense—there can be no national poetry, no true national art, no national music, except as more or less intimately connected with the spirit of such a period.
It was not the genius of democracy simply, as Grote and some other historians maintain, but the heroic remembrances of the Persian invasion, that roused the Grecian mind, and created the brilliant period of the Grecian civilization. The new energy that came from this period was felt in every department—of song, of eloquence, of art, and even of philosophy. Marathon and Salamis still sustained the national life when it was waning under the mere political wisdom of Pericles, the factious recklessness of Alcibiades, and the still more debasing influence of the venal demagogues of later times. When this old spirit had gone out, there was nothing in the mere forms of her free institutions that could prevent Athens from sinking down into insignificance, or from being absorbed in the growth of new and rising powers.