t is better to confine ourselves to our
accustomed weapons: we are men of peace, and only want our own property
restored to us. If we can not succeed in convincing others of our
rights, there is no help for it. Plenty of powder will be shot away to
no purpose--plenty of efforts without result, and expenditure which only
tends to impoverish. There is no race so little qualified to make
progress, and to gain civilization and culture in exchange for capital,
as the Slavonic. All that those people yonder have in their idleness
acquired by the oppression of the ignorant masses they waste in foolish
diversions. With us, only a few of the specially privileged classes act
thus, and the nation can bear with it if necessary; but there, the
privileged classes claim to represent the people. As if nobles and mere
bondsmen could ever form a state! They have no more capacity for it than
that flight of sparrows on the hedge. The worst of it is that we must
pay for their luckless attempt."

"They have no middle class," rejoined Anton, proudly.

"In other words, they have no culture," continued the merchant; "and it
is remarkable how powerless they are to generate the class which
represents civilization and progress, and exalts an aggregate of
individual laborers into a state."

"In the town before us, however," suggested Anton, "there is Conrad
Gaultier, and the house of the three Hildebrands in Galicia as well."

"Worthy people," agreed the merchant, "but they are all merely settlers,
and the honorable burgher-class feeling has no root here, and seldom
goes down to a second generation. What is here called a city is a mere
shadow of ours, and its citizens have hardly any of those qualities
which with us characterize commercial men--the first class in the
state."

"The first?" said Anton, doubtingly.

"Yes, dear Wohlfart, the first. Originally individuals were free, and,
in the main, equal; then came the semi-barbarism of the privileged idler
and the laboring bondsman. It is only since the growth of our large
towns that the world boasts civilized states--only since then is the
problem solved which proves that free labor alone makes national life
noble, secure, and permanent."

Toward evening our travelers reached the frontier station. It was a
small village, consisting, in addition to the custom-house and the
dwellings of the officials, of only a few poor cottages and a public
house. On the open space between the houses, and roun