ing to some tradition--some old order or disorder
of things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in the
least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely narrow and
personal impulse toward reaction.

The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the range of the
German peasant's conceptions. His only notion of representation is that
of a representation of ranks--of classes; his only notion of a deputy is
of one who takes care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests
of his own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party,
in common with the bureaucratic governments, that they entirely omitted
the peculiar character of the peasant from their political calculations.
They talked of the "people" and forgot that the peasants were included in
the term. Only a baseless misconception of the peasant's character could
induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm about
the principles involved in the reconstitution of the Empire, or even
about the reconstitution itself. He has no zeal for a written law, as
such, but only so far as it takes the form of a living law--a tradition.
It was the external authority which the revolutionary party had won in
Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the struggle.

Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German
peasantry--characteristics which subsist amid a wide variety of
circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg the peasant
lives on extensive estates; in Westphalia he lives in large isolated
homesteads; in the Westerwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of
villages and hamlets; on the Rhine land is for the most part parcelled
out among small proprietors, who live together in large villages. Then,
of course, the diversified physical geography of Germany gives rise to
equally diversified methods of land-culture; and out of these various
circumstances grow numerous specific differences in manner and character.
But the generic character of the German peasant is everywhere the same;
in the clean mountain hamlet and in the dirty fishing village on the
coast; in the plains of North Germany and in the backwoods of America.
"Everywhere he has the same historical character--everywhere custom is
his supreme law. Where religion and patriotism are still a naive
instinct, are still a sacred _custom_, there begins the class of the
German Peasantry."