Cologne, February 22. In the *Ober-Postamts-Zeitung*, whose former editor was a paid agent of Guizot (see Taschereau’s *Revue rétrospective*) and an unpaid agent of Metternich, just as, indeed, the whole Thurn and Taxis postal service, that national post-boy institute which weighs upon German industry, is at war with the railways, and crawls backwards—whose continued existence after March is scarcely comprehensible and whose immediate abolition will be one of the first acts of the German Constituent Assembly which is shortly to be opened (the Assembly in St. Paul’s was notorious for never being constituent in character)—has never been anything since the time of Joseph II but an Austrian den of spies—in this imperial denunciatory newspaper belonging to this ex-Prince of Thurn and Taxis, the responsible editor H. Malten (already pilloried in the old *Rheinische Zeitung*) expresses himself as follows, claiming to be reprinting the following Paris correspondence from a paper which we do not read:

“To the shame of the German name we must confess that it is specifically Germans who, in our midst, are carrying on subversive activities on the grandest, not to say most shameless, scale. There exists here a special bureau of the Reds, from which all inflammatory articles against the order of human society that can be procured are speedily sent out to the provinces. Not content with Germans taking part in this disreputable activity on behalf of France: it is also to them that we owe the fact that an execrable propaganda is ceaselessly spreading its nets over Germany. From the witches’ cauldron of this selfsame revolutionary kitchen, the entire length of the German Rhine valley is flooded with revolutionary paper, about which the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* would have many a tale to tell, if it did not deem it advisable on this one point to preserve a careful silence. In the upper part of Baden the lower strata of the people have been worked upon from Paris for months past. The connections of the local democrats with the refugees in Switzerland are likewise a fact.”

We remark on this wretched denunciation: 1) that we have never concealed our connections with the French, English, Italian, Swiss, Belgian, Polish, American and other democrats; and 2) that the “revolutionary paper” with which we certainly do “flood the German Rhine valley (and not only that!)” we are also in the habit of producing here in Cologne itself. For that we need no assistance from Paris; we have been accustomed for a number of years to the fact that our Paris friends take more from us than we do from them.