o by a party of South and Middle German Liberal
_doctrinaires_, who considered as a godsend the degrading
circumstances by which their old crotchet was now again brought
forward as the latest "new move" for the salvation of the country.

They accordingly finished, in February and March, 1849, the debate on
the Imperial Constitution, together with the Declaration of Rights
and the Imperial Electoral Law; not, however, without being obliged to
make, in a great many points, the most contradictory concessions--now
to the Conservative or rather Reactionary party--now to the more
advanced factions of the Assembly. In fact, it was evident that the
leadership of the Assembly, which had formerly belonged to the Right
and Right Centre (the Conservatives and Reactionists), was gradually,
although slowly, passing toward the Left or Democratic side of that
body. The rather dubious position of the Austrian deputies in an
Assembly which had excluded their country from Germany, and in which
they yet were called upon to sit and vote, favored the derangement of
its equipoise; and thus, as early as the end of February, the Left
Centre and Left found themselves, by the help of the Austrian votes,
very generally in a majority, while on other days the Conservative
faction of the Austrians, all of a sudden, and for the fun of the
thing, voting with the Right, threw the balance again on the other
side. They intended, by these sudden _soubresauts_, to bring the
Assembly into contempt, which, however, was quite unnecessary, the
mass of the people being long since convinced of the utter hollowness
and futility of anything coming from Frankfort. What a specimen of a
Constitution, in the meantime, was framed under such jumping and
counter-jumping, may easily be imagined.

The Left of the Assembly--this _elite_ and pride of revolutionary
Germany, as it believed itself to be--was entirely intoxicated with
the few paltry successes it obtained by the good-will, or rather the
ill-will, of a set of Austrian politicians, acting under the
instigation and for the interest of Austrian despotism. Whenever the
slightest approximation to their own not very well-defined principles
had, in a homoeopathically diluted shape, obtained a sort of
sanction by the Frankfort Assembly, these Democrats proclaimed that
they had saved the country and the people. These poor, weak-minded
men, during the course of their generally very obscure lives, had been
so little accusto