XXIII. Prussians by birth, but drawn to Prussia as the centre of CHAP. national hopes, that won the admiration and gratitude of a liberated Fatherland; while the French, who had been wont to treat the North Germans with a strangely misplaced contempt, felt for them, after the campaigns of Leipzig and Waterloo, a hatred not less bitter than that they bore to England herself. This great deliverance was far more the work of the people than of King or Court; but as was natural, it induced a burst of loyalty which strengthened and glorified the Prussian monarchy in the eyes of Germany, and gave it an opportunity of placing itself at the head of the nation. For the national feeling which had smouldered for two centuries or more, had now risen into a strong and brilliant flame; and it was on Prussia, more than on any other state, that its light was shed. Austria's merits as well as her faults did not permit her to be popular; Bavaria and Würtemberg had been aggrandized by Napoleon; Saxony had adhered to him throughout; Prussia had suffered most grievously and triumphed most signally. Now would have been the time for her to answer to the great cry that went up for freedom and unity, to secure by firm action the rights of the people in a consolidated German state. Frederick But the hour came without the man. William III was well intentioned indeed, but feeble and narrow-minded; and his court had not yet recovered from its horror at the principles of 1789 and the acts of 1793. As the want of representative institutions and of the habit of combination for political purposes gave the desire ↳ Sybel (Begründung des Deutschen Reiches) well observes that the spirit of German nationality was largely re-created by a group of men, some of them not Prussians, on ground East of the Elbe which was not originally German but Slavonic. CHAP. XXIII. of Vienna. for unity no means of expressing itself practically, it remained an aspiration, a sentiment, nothing more. Thus, The Congress when the Congress of Vienna met to reconstitute Europe and Germany, the princes were masters of the situation; and they used their advantage with characteristic selfishness. The proclamation of Kalisch issued by the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia, when they leagued themselves against Napoleon (March 25th, 1813), announced the object of the two powers to be 'to aid the German peoples in recovering freedom and independence, and to afford to them effective protection and defence in re-establishing a venerable Empire.' The reconstitution of the country, it was added, was to be effected solely by the united action of the princes and peoples, and was to proceed from the ancient and native spirit of the German nation; that Germany, the more perfectly this work was executed in its principles and compass, might so much the more appear again among the peoples of Europe in renovated youth, strength, and unity.' But at the Congress nothing was heard, and indeed nothing would have been listened to, of the kind. When it opened, Hardenberg the Prussian minister presented a scheme which, although it recognized in the princes an independence in some respects considerable, and already conceded to them by the treaties securing their adhesion against France, proposed to treat Germany as being for many purposes a united state, under institutions whose tendency would have been to make her less and less of a mere league. Austria however, under the chilling influence of Metternich, himself perhaps prompted by the darker spirit of Frederick i For the Congress of Vienna students may refer to L. Häusser's Deutsche Geschichte; for the subsequent history of the Confederation to H. Schulze, Einleitung in das deutsche Staatsrecht, and K. Klüpfel, Die deutschen Einheitsbestrebungen seit 1815. XXIII. von Gentz, received these proposals with dull disfavour: CHAP. the minor potentates, headed by Bavaria and Würtemberg, entered energetic protests against anything which could infringe on their sovereignty, protests so sweeping that even Austria was obliged to remind them that under the old Empire certain rights were assured to German subjects, while the envoy of Hanover exclaimed against the 'Sultanism' of these members of the late Confederation of the Rhine. At last, after a long period of confusion and uncertainty, in which projects for the restoration of the 'ancient venerable Empire' were frequently put forward, and supported among others by Stein, a counter-scheme, propounded by Metternich, when he found that he could not secure the complete independence of the German princes, was moulded into the Act of Foundation of the Germanic Confederation. The work was hastily done, under the pressure of alarm at Napoleon's return from Elba, and professed to be only an outline, which was to be subsequently improved and filled in. The diplomatists were exhausted by a long course of bickering and intrigue upon this and other questions; many were dissatisfied, but every one saw that his opponent's power of hindering was greater than his own power of forcing a proposition through; and as it was clear that something must be done, people brought themselves to a sort of acquiescence, which, though it professed to be only temporary, could not easily be recalled, and made it harder to reopen the discussion. So the proposed completion, as was natural in a matter of so much delicacy and difficulty, never took place; and the revised draft of the Act of Confederation, adopted on June Establish 10th, 1815, a week before Waterloo, was in all its main ment of the features the constitution which lasted down till 1866. Prussia yielded with unaccountable readiness — unac- tion. countable except on the hypothesis that her ministers, Germanic Confedera CHAP. Hardenberg and William von Humboldt, despaired at such a time and among such people of effecting anything satisfactory-the points on which she had at first insisted; and made little further objection to the carrying out of Metternich's views. Her king was a faithful member of the Holy Alliance: her government adhered to the principles associated with that compact, and was content in internal questions to follow humbly in the wake of Austria. While the Reaction was triumphing in the rest of Europe, Particularism' triumphed at Vienna, and the interests of the German people were forgotten or ignored. The federal constitution, while recognizing fully the sovereignty of the princes in their own territories, had made only the feeblest provisions for the concession of popular rights and the establishment of representative institutions in the several states. Almost the only expression which it allowed to be given to the idea of national unity was in the creation of a central federal body, the Diet, wherein only the princes and not their subjects were represented, which was empowered to act in foreign affairs, and which could be made by the great princes the means of repressing any liberal movements on the part of an individual member. But this did not satisfy Metternich. The excitement produced by the War of Liberation did not at once subside: the ideas of freedom, national unity, national greatness, which it had called forth, had obtained a dominion over the minds of the German youth; and were eloquently preached by some of the noblest spirits among its teachers.* These ideas, however, innocent as they 1 Particularismus is the name by which the Germans denote the policy or feeling, which maintained the independence of the several local potentates who were members of the Germanic body. The history of the movement for German Unity from 1815 onwards may be read in H. von Sybel's Begründung des Deutschen Reiches. XXIII. would now appear, and well founded as was the jealousy of CHAP. Condition of Germany under the Confedera This Karlsbad Conference struck the keynote of the policy of the Federal Diet during the three and thirty dreary years that lie between 1815 and the brief though bright awakening of 1848. If the selfishness of rulers tion. were not the commonest moral of history, there would be something extraordinary as well as offensive in the horror of change and reform which was now exhibited by these very princes who had, with Napoleon's help or connivance, carried out by the mediatization of their weaker neighbours a revolution far more sweeping, and in point of law less. defensible, than any which the patriotic reformers now 1 See Aegidi, Aus dem Jahre 1819. |