relation between king and people into a conventional and constitutional one; and never more will I yield to the demand that, between our Lord God in heaven and this country, a written paper shall interpose itself to take the place of the old sacred ties of loyalty by which people and prince are bound together." So the piece of written paper, called the Acts of the Congress of Vienna, and the vows that accompanied it, were trampled under foot by a second Frederick William; and the Prussian people were obliged to content themselves with the institution of provincial or local parliaments, and the shadow of a sort of national assembly called der Vereinigte Landtag, instituted in 1847, all under the sacred thumb of the old military and bureaucratic absolutism.
But matters could not continue in this state. • The air of Europe was electric with liberalism; even aristocratic old England had had her Reform Bill; and grown-up men, rejoicing to stand on their own legs, would not be forever treated as minors. In 1848 another French revolution broke out, accompanied with the usual portents of fugitive kings and floating coronets, and altogether in a much more startling and explosive style than in the previous affair of 1832. Then only a little duke of Brunswick was blown into smoke; but now the mighty Metternich himself was exploded, and from his firm seat in Vienna, where he had controlled the whole diplomacy of Europe for half a century, wafted over the seas to England, the general house of refuge for the democratic and oligarchic destitute from all quarters. The sweet-blooded Viennese were fevered with a strange astonishment when they saw on one fine morning a mob of students flaming with wild notions, and troops of tatterdemalion artisans, marching through the streets, braying about liberty, and sitting on the seat of government for a year and a day.
But it could not last long: the firm front of Prince Windischgrätz's cannon, and the fair promise of a new kaiser on the 7th March, 1849, brought back the liberal chaos into the old conservative order. In middle and northern Germany outbreaks of the epidemic of democracy equally violent took place. At Baden, where German liberalism had long had its chief seat, even before the outbreak of republicanism in France, Bassermann, a distinguished deputy of the liberal party, had brought in a bill in the Chambers for summoning a general German Parliament in Frankfort, to consider the best means of breaking down the unkindly wall of partition that at present separated the people of Germany from the princes; and in obedience to this bold patriotic summons, the 18th of May saw three hundred and twenty deputies from all parts of Germany assembled in the Paul's Kirche at Frankfort, to deliberate on the political state of the Fatherland, and, out of the ruins of petty princedom, to re-create the splendid mediæval empire of the Othos and the Barbarossas. And no doubt if mere German ideas and German patriotic talk could have produced a new German order of things, a German empire would have leapt into existence at the word of command in those days. But these things are not done by mere ideas, however just, and by mere debates, however eloquent. The Frankfort Chambers drew up a constitution for the new German empire, appointed a chancellor, the Archduke John of Austria, for the nonce; but when the articles of the constitution came to be realized it was found there was no power willing to enforce the decrees; and so the stentorian giant of German liberalism stood powerless in the old imperial city, a helpless trunk, without either legs to stand on or arms to strike with. The Frankfort Parliament, after oceans of wise talk, dwindled into a rump, and the rump, true to the destiny of all rumps, was dispersed into a nonentity by a Stuttgart minister named Roemer, who had a head hard enough and a hand firm enough to do it.
Meanwhile, at Berlin, a notable tragicomedy had been enacted. Mobs of people had started up before the palace in the Schlossplatz, brandishing knives and ropes in red revolutionary fashion; barricades were erected in the Königs Strasse, and grape-shot had been set to rake the citizens. Then suddenly repentance seized the heart of the monarch; and he was seen riding up the Linden with the imperial tricolor of black, red, and gold, and proclaiming with a loud voice, "Von jetzt an geht Preussen in Deutschland auf" (From this moment Prussia is swallowed up in Germany). But this was a rhetorical phrase which any word-monger, actor, or poet, or master of elocution, could use; to do the thing at that moment was possible only to a real king of men; and such Frederick William IV. was not. In the face of this grand speech, he afterwards (28th March, 1849) refused to accept of the imperial crown, when offered to him by the men of the Paul's Kirche in Frankfort.
Nevertheless, the Berlin insurrection
