rst professor of German at
Harvard), preferred the establishment of a German republic on lines
similar to those of the United States of America. Under a policy of
suppression, manipulated by Metternich with consummate skill in the
interest of Austria against Prussia and against German confidence in the
sincerity and trustworthiness of the Prussian government, the reaction
had by arrests, prosecutions, circumlocution-office delays, banishments,
and an elaborate system of espionage, for the most part silenced
opposition and saved, not the state, but, at any rate, the _status quo_.
This "success" had incidentally cost Germany the presence and service of
some of the ablest and best of her own youth, who spent the rest of
their lives in France, England, Switzerland, or the United States. We
Americans owe to this "success" some of the most admirable types of our
citizenship--expatriated Germans like Karl Follen, Karl Beck, Franz
Lieber, the brothers Wesselhoeft, and many others.

Wienbarg dedicated in 1834 his _Esthetic Campaigns_ to Young Germany.
This term has since then served friend and foe to designate the group of
writers of whom we speak. Their slogan was freedom. Freedom from
cramping police surveillance; freedom from the arbitrary control of
government, unchecked by responsibility to the people; freedom from the
narrowing prescriptions of ecclesiastical authority, backed by the power
of the state; freedom from the literary restraint of medievalism in
modern letters--these and various other brands of freedom were demanded
by different members of the school. Just because the birth-throes of
modern Germany, which extend over the first seventy years of the
nineteenth century, were especially violent during the period under
consideration, the program of the school had from the outset a strong
political bias. The broad masses of the people were unacquainted with
political forms and principles. They were by time-hallowed tradition
virtually the wards of their patriarchal princes, sharing with these
protectors a high degree of jealous regard for state sovereignty and of
instinctive opposition towards any and all attempts to secure popular
restraint of the sovereign's will and national unification, that should
demand subordination of the single state to the central government. All
early attempts to awaken popular interest in social and political reform
had fallen flat, because of this helpless ignorance and indifference of
pu