usiness should be to frame a constitution. But this
commission was not then appointed, and of course did not meet on the
first of September. Two years later the commissioners were named; but
their work has never been heard of.

Here is to be discerned a manifest wavering in the mind of the king
respecting the fulfilment of his intentions. The German States, taught
by the bitter experience of the late war the disadvantages of their
dismembered condition, and bound together more closely than ever before
by the recollection of their common sufferings and common triumphs, saw
the necessity of a real union, to take the place of the merely nominal
one which had thus far existed in the shadowy hegemony of the house of
Hapsburg. The German Confederation, essentially as it still exists, was
organized at Vienna by the rulers of the several German States and
representatives from the free cities, June 8, 1815. Although there was
in this assembly no direct representation of the people, it is clear
that its deliberations were in great part determined by the unmistakable
utterances of the popular mind. For one of the first measures adopted
was to provide that in all the States of the Confederacy constitutional
governments should be guaranteed. Frederick William himself was one of
the most urgent supporters of this provision. It is therefore not
calculated to elevate our estimation of the openness, honesty, and
simplicity for which this king is praised, and to which his general
course seems to entitle him, that as late as March, 1818, in reply to a
petition from the city of Coblenz, that he would grant the promised
constitution, he remarked that 'neither the order of May 22, 1815, nor
article xiii. of the acts of the Confederacy had fixed the _time_ of the
grant, and that the determination of this time must be left to the free
choice of the sovereign, in whom unconditional confidence ought to be
placed.' We are to account for this hesitation, however, not by
supposing that he originally intended to delay the measure in question
so long as he actually did delay it, but by the fears with which he was
inspired by the popular demonstrations in the times following the close
of the war. The fact was palpable, not only that the idea of popular
rights, notwithstanding the miserable failure of the French Revolution,
had become everywhere current, but that, together with this feeling, a
desire for German unity was weakening the hold of the severa