ts, and taste--this idea was, indeed, very widely spread,
particularly in the smaller States. Ever since the dissolution of the
German Empire by Napoleon, the cry for a union of all the _disjecta
membra_ of the German body had been the most general expression of
discontent with the established order of things, and most so in the
smaller States, where costliness of a court, an administration, an
army, in short, the dead weight of taxation, increased in a direct
ratio with the smallness and impotency of the State. But what this
German unity was to be when carried out was a question upon which
parties disagreed. The bourgeoisie, which wanted no serious
revolutionary convulsion, were satisfied with what we have seen they
considered "practicable," namely a union of all Germany, exclusive of
Austria, under the supremacy of a Constitutional Government of
Prussia; and surely, without conjuring dangerous storms, nothing more
could, at that time, be done. The shopkeeping class and the peasantry,
as far as these latter troubled themselves about such things, never
arrived at any definition of that German unity they so loudly
clamoured after; a few dreamers, mostly feudalist reactionists, hoped
for the re-establishment of the German Empire; some few ignorant,
_soi-disant_ Radicals, admiring Swiss institutions, of which they had
not yet made that practical experience which afterwards most
ludicrously undeceived them, pronounced for a Federated Republic; and
it was only the most extreme party which, at that time, dared
pronounce for a German Republic, one and indivisible. Thus, German
unity was in itself a question big with disunion, discord, and, in the
case of certain eventualities, even civil war.

To resume, then; this was the state of Prussia, and the smaller States
of Germany, at the end of 1847. The middle class, feeling their
power, and resolved not to endure much longer the fetters with which
a feudal and bureaucratic despotism enchained their commercial
transactions, their industrial productivity, their common action as a
class; a portion of the landed nobility so far changed into producers
of mere marketable commodities, as to have the same interests and to
make common cause with the middle class; the smaller trading class,
dissatisfied, grumbling at the taxes, at the impediments thrown in the
way of their business, but without any definite plan for such reforms
as should secure their position in the social and political bo