with her feet; and as she cannot possibly
stoop to pick them up, she motions to a boy playing near, and smiles so
happily as the urchin gathers them and runs away without even a "thank
ye."

A TASTE OF ULTRAMONTANISM

If that of which every German dreams, and so few are ready to take any
practical steps to attain,--German unity,--ever comes, it must ride
roughshod over the Romish clergy, for one thing. Of course there are
other obstacles. So long as beer is cheap, and songs of the Fatherland
are set to lilting strains, will these excellent people "Ho, ho, my
brothers," and "Hi, hi, my brothers," and wait for fate, in the shape
of some compelling Bismarck, to drive them into anything more than the
brotherhood of brown mugs of beer and Wagner's mysterious music of the
future. I am not sure, by the way, that the music of Richard Wagner
is not highly typical of the present (1868) state of German unity,--an
undefined longing which nobody exactly understands. There are those
who think they can discern in his music the same revolutionary tendency
which placed the composer on the right side of a Dresden barricade in
1848, and who go so far as to believe that the liberalism of the young
King of Bavaria is not a little due to his passion for the disorganizing
operas of this transcendental writer. Indeed, I am not sure that any
other people than Germans would not find in the repetition of the five
hours of the "Meister-Singer von Nurnberg," which was given the other
night at the Hof Theater, sufficient reason for revolution.

Well, what I set out to say was, that most Germans would like unity if
they could be the unit. Each State would like to be the center of the
consolidated system, and thus it happens that every practical step
toward political unity meets a host of opponents at once. When Austria,
or rather the house of Hapsburg, had a preponderance in the Diet, and it
seemed, under it, possible to revive the past reality, or to realize the
dream of a great German empire, it was clearly seen that Austria was a
tyranny that would crush out all liberties. And now that Prussia, with
its vital Protestantism and free schools, proposes to undertake the
reconstruction of Germany, and make a nation where there are now only
the fragmentary possibilities of a great power, why, Prussia is a
military despot, whose subjects must be either soldiers or slaves, and
the young emperor at Vienna is indeed another Joseph, filled with the