[New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3292, November 6, 1851] 

In our last we confined ourselves almost exclusively to that State 
which, during the years 1840 to 1848, was by far the most important 
in the German movement; namely, to Prussia. It is, however, time to 
pass a rapid glance over the other States of Germany during the 
same period. 

As to the petty States, they had, ever since the revolutionary 
movements of 1830, completely passed under the dictatorship of the 
Diet, that is, of Austria and Prussia. The several constitutions, 
established as much as a means of defense against the dictates of the 
larger States, as to insure popularity to their princely authors and 
unity to heterogeneous assemblies of provinces, formed by the 
Congress of Vienna, without any leading principle whatever —these 
constitutions, illusory as they were, had yet proved dangerous to the 
authority of the petty princes themselves during the excited times of 
1830 and 1831. They were all but destroyed; whatever of them was 
allowed to remain, was less than a shadow, and it required the 
loquacious self-complacency of a Welcker, a Rotteck, a Dahlmann, to 
imagine that any results could possibly flow from the humble 
opposition, mingled with degrading flattery, which they were 
allowed to show off in the impotent chambers of these petty States. 

The more energetic portion of the middle class in these smaller 
States, very soon after 1840, abandoned all the hopes they had 
formerly based upon the development of Parliamentary government 
in these dependencies of Austria and Prussia. No sooner had the 
Prussian bourgeoisie, and the classes allied to it, shown a serious 
resolution to struggle for Parliamentary government in Prussia, than 
they were allowed to take the lead of the Constitutional movement 
over al] non-Austrian Germany. It is a fact which now will not be any 
longer contested, that the nucleus of those Constitutionalists of 
Central Germany, who afterwards seceded from the Frankfort 
National Assembly, and who, from the place of their separate 
meetings, were called the Gotha party,”’ long before 1848 contem- 
plated a plan which, with little modification, they in 1849 proposed 
to the representatives of all Germany. They intended a complete 
exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation, the establish- 
ment of a new Confederation with a new fundamental law and with a 
federal Parliament, under the protection of Prussia, and the 
incorporation of the more insignificant States into the larger ones. 
All this was to be carried out the moment Prussia entered into the 

ranks of constitutional monarchy, established the liberty of the press, 
assumed a policy independent from that of Russia and Austria, and 
thus enabled the Constitutionalists of the lesser States to obtain a real 
control over their respective Governments. The inventor of this 
scheme was Professor Gervinus, of Heidelberg (Baden). Thus the 
emancipation of the Prussian bourgeoisie was to be the signal for that 
of the middle classes of Germany generally, and for an alliance, 
offensive and defensive, of both against Russia and Austria; for 
Austria was, as we shall see presently, considered as an entirely 
barbarian country, of which very little was known, and that little not 
to the credit of its population; Austria, therefore, was not considered 
as an essential part of Germany. 

As to the other classes of society, in the smaller States, they 
followed, more or less rapidly, in the wake of their equals in Prussia. 
The shopkeeping class got more and more dissatisfied with their 
respective Governments, with the increase of taxation, with the 
curtailments of those political sham-privileges of which they used to 
boast when comparing themselves to the “slaves of despotism” in 
Austria and Prussia; but as yet they had nothing definite in their 
opposition which might stamp them as an independent party, 
distinct from the Constitutionalism of the higher bourgeoisie. The 
dissatisfaction among the peasantry was equally growing, but it is 
well known that this section of the people, in quiet and peaceful 
times, will never assert its interests and assume its position as an 
independent class, except in countries where universal suffrage is 
established. The working classes in the trades and manufactures of 
the towns commenced to be infected with the “poison” of Socialism 
and Communism, but there being few towns of any importance out 
of Prussia, and still fewer manufacturing districts, the movement of 
this class, owing to the want of centers of action and propaganda, was 
extremely slow in the smaller States. 

Both in Prussia and in the smaller States, the difficulty of giving 
vent to political opposition created a sort of religious opposition in 
the parallel movements of German Catholicism and Free Con- 
gregationalism.”* History affords us numerous examples where, in 
countries which enjoy the blessings of a State Church, and where 
political discussion is fettered, the profane and dangerous opposition 
against the worldly power is hid under the more sanctified and 
apparently more disinterested struggle against spiritual despotism. 
Many a government that will not allow of any of its acts being 
discussed, will hesitate before it creates martyrs and excites the 
religious fanaticism of the masses. Thus in Germany, in 1845, in 
every State, either the Roman Catholic or the Protestant religion, or 

both, were considered part and parcel of the law of the land. In every 
State, too, the clergy of either of those denominations, or of both, 
formed an essential part of the bureaucratic establishment of the 
Government. To attack Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy, to attack 
priestcraft, was, then, to make an underhand attack upon the 
Government itself. As to the German Catholics, their very existence 
was an attack upon the Catholic Governments of Germany, 
particularly Austria and Bavaria; and as such it was taken by those 
Governments. The Free Congregationalists, Protestant Dissenters, 
somewhat resembling the English and American Unitarians,” 
openly professed their opposition to the clerical and rigidly orthodox 
tendency of the King of Prussia and his favorite Minister for the 
Educational and Clerical Department, Mr. Eichhorn. The two new 
sects, rapidly extending for a moment, the first in Catholic, the 
second in Protestant countries, had no other distinction but their 
different origin; as to their tenets, they perfectly agreed upon this 
most important point—that all definite dogmas were nugatory. This 
want of any definition was their very essence; they pretended to 
build that great temple under the roof of which all Germans might 
unite; they thus represented, in a religious form, another political 
idea of the day—that of German Unity; and yet, they could never 
agree among themselves. 

The idea of German Unity, which the above-mentioned sects 
sought to realize at least upon religious ground, by inventing a 
common religion for all Germans, manufactured expressly for their 
use, habits, 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 the 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 
convulsions, 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 ume, 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 clamored after; 
a few dreamers, mostly feudalist reactionists, hoped for the 
re-establishment of the German Empire; some few ignorant, 
sot-disant radicals, admiring Swiss institutions, of which they had not 
yet made that practical experience which afterward 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 its 
power, and resolved not to endure much longer the fetters with 
which a feudal and bureaucratic despotism enchained their commer- 
cial 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 body; the peasantry, oppressed here by feudal 
exactions, there by money-lenders, usurers, and lawyers; the 
working people of the towns, infected with the general discontent, 
equally hating the Government and the large industrial capitalists, 
and catching the contagion of Socialist and Communist ideas; in 
short, a heterogeneous mass of opposition, springing from various 
interests, but more or less led on by the bourgeoisie, in the first ranks 
of which again marched the bourgeoisie of Prussia and particularly 
of the Rhine Province. On the other hand, governments disagreeing 
upon many points, distrustful of each other, and particularly of that 
of Prussia, upon which yet they had to rely for protection; in Prussia, 
a government forsaken by public opinion, forsaken by even a portion 
of the nobility, leaning upon an army and a bureaucracy which every 
day got more infected by the ideas and subjected to the influence of 
the oppositional bourgeoisie—a government, besides all this, pen- 
niless in the most literal meaning of the word, and which could not 
procure a single cent to cover its increasing deficit, but by surrend- 
ering at discretion to the opposition of the bourgeoisie. Was there 
ever a more splendid position for the middle class of any country, 
while it struggled for power against the established government? 

London, September, 1851 

IV 
AUSTRIA 

[New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3293, November 7, 1851] 

We have now to consider Austria, that country which up to March, 
1848, was sealed up to the eyes of foreign nations almost as much as 
China before the late war with England.” | 

As a matter of course, we can here take into consideration nothing 
but German Austria. The affairs of the Polish, Hungarian or Italian 
Austrians do not belong to our subject, and as far as they, since 1848, 
have influenced the fate of the German Austrians, they will have to 
be taken into account hereafter. 

The Government of Prince Metternich turned upon two hinges: 
firstly, to keep every one of the different nations, subjected to the 
Austrian rule, in check by all other nations similarly conditioned; 
secondly, and this always has been the fundamental principle of 
absolute monarchies, to rely for support upon two classes, the feudal 
landlords and the large stockjobbing capitalists; and to balance, at 
the same time, the influence and power of either of these classes by 
that of the other, so as to leave full independence of action to the 
Government. The landed nobility, whose entire income consisted in 
feudal revenues of all sorts, could not but support a government 
which proved their only protection against that downtrodden class of 
serfs upon whose spoils they lived; and whenever the less wealthy 
portion of them, as in Galicia, in 1846, rose in opposition against the 
Government, Metternich,in an instant, let loose upon them these 
very serfs, who at any rate profited by the occasion to wreak a terrible 
vengeance upon their more immediate oppressors.”’ On the other 
hand, the large capitalists of the Exchange were chained to 
Metternich’s Government by the vast share they had in the public 
funds of the country. Austria, restored to her full power in 1815, 
restoring and maintaining in Italy absolute monarchy ever since 
1820, freed of part of her liabilities by the bankruptcy of 1810,* had 
after the peace very soon re-established her credit in the great 
European money markets, and in proportion as her credit grew, she 
had drawn against it. Thus all the large European money-dealers 
had engaged considerable portions of their capital in the Austrian 
funds; they all of them were interested in upholding the credit of 
that country, and as Austrian public credit, in order to be upheld, 
ever required new loans, they were obliged from time to time to 

advance new capital in order to keep up the credit of the securities 
for that which they already had advanced. The long peace after 
1815, and the apparent impossibility of a thousand years old empire, 
like Austria, being upset, increased the credit of Metternich’s 
Government in a wonderful ratio, and made it even independent of 
the good will of the Vienna bankers and stockjobbers; for as long as 
Metternich could obtain plenty of money at Frankfort and 
Amsterdam, he had, of course, the satisfaction of seeing the Austrian 
capitalists at his feet. They were, besides, in every other respect at his 
mercy; the large profits which bankers, stockjobbers and govern- 
ment contractors always contrive to draw out of an absolute 
monarchy, were compensated for by the almost unlimited power 
which the Government possessed over their persons and fortunes; 
and not the smallest shadow of an opposition was, therefore, to be 
expected from this quarter. Thus, Metternich was sure of the 
support of the two most powerful and influential classes of the 
empire, and he possessed, besides, an army and a bureaucracy 
which, for all purposes of absolutism, could not be better constituted. 
The civil and military officers in the Austrian service form a race 
of their own; their fathers have been in the service of the Kaiser, and 
so will their sons be; they belong to none of the multifarious 
nationalities congregated under the wing of the double-headed 
eagle; they are, and ever have been, removed from one end of the 
empire to the other, from Poland to Italy, from Germany to 
Transylvania; Hungarian, Pole, German, Rumanian, Italian, Croat, 
every individual not stamped with “imperial and royal” authority, 
&c., bearing a separate national character, is equally despised by 
them; they have no nationality, or rather they alone make up the 
really Austrian nation. It is evident what a pliable and at the same 
time powerful instrument, in the hands of an intelligent and 
energetic chief, such a civil and military hierarchy must be. 

As to the other classes of the population, Metternich, in the true 
spirit of a statesman of the ancien régime, cared little for their 
support. He had, with regard to them, but one policy: to draw as 
much as possible out of them in the shape of taxation, and at the 
same time, to keep them quiet. The trading and manufacturing 
middle class was but of slow growth in Austria. The trade of the 
Danube was comparatively unimportant; the country possessed but 
one port, Trieste, and the trade of this port was very limited. As to 
the manufacturers, they enjoyed considerable protection, amount- 
ing even in most cases to the complete exclusion of all foreign 
competition; but this advantage had been granted to them principal- 
ly with a view to increase their tax-paying capabilities, and was in a 

high degree counterpoised by internal restrictions on manufactures, 
privileges of guilds and other feudal corporations, which were 
scrupulously upheld as long as they did not impede the purposes and 
views of the Government. The petty tradesmen were encased in the 
narrow bounds of these medieval guilds, which kept the different 
trades in a perpetual war of privilege against each other, and at the 
same time, by all but excluding individuals of the working class from 
the possibility of raising themselves in the social scale, gave a sort of 
hereditary stability to the members of those involuntary associations. 
Lastly, the peasant and the working man were treated as mere 
taxable matter, and the only care that was taken of them, was to keep 
them as much as possible in the same conditions of life in which they 
then existed, and in which their fathers had existed before them. For 
this purpose, every old established hereditary authority was upheld 
in the same manner as that of the State; the authority of the landlord 
over the petty tenant-farmer, that of the manufacturer over the 
operative, of the small master over the journeyman and apprentice, 
of the father over the son, was everywhere rigidly maintained by the 
Government, and every branch of disobedience punished, the same 
as a transgression of the law, by that universal instrument of 
Austrian justice—the stick. 

Finally, to wind up into one comprehensive system all these 
attempts at creating an artificial stability, the intellectual food 
allowed to the nation was selected with the minutest caution, and 
dealt out as sparingly as possible. Education was everywhere in the 
hands of the Catholic priesthood, whose chiefs, in the same manner 
as the large feudal landowners, were deeply interested in the 
conservation of the existing system. The universities were organized 
in a manner which allowed them to produce nothing but special 
men, that might or might not obtain great proficiency in sundry 
particular branches of knowledge, but which, at all events, excluded 
that universal liberal education which other universities are expected 
to impart. There was absolutely no newspaper press, except in 
Hungary, and the Hungarian papers were prohibited in all other 
parts of the monarchy. As to general literature, its range had not 
widened for a century; it had been narrowed again after the death of 
Joseph II. And all around the frontier, wherever the Austrian States 
touched upon a civilized country, a cordon of literary censors was 
established in connection with the cordon of custom-house officials, 
preventing any foreign book or newspaper from passing into Austria 
before its contents had been twice or three times thoroughly sifted, 
and found pure of even the slightest contamination of the malignant 
spirit of the age. 

For about thirty years after 1815, this system worked with 
wonderful success. Austria remained almost unknown to Europe, 
and Europe was quite as little known in Austria. The social state of 
every class of the population, and of the population as a whole, 
appeared not to have undergone the slightest change. Whatever 
rancor there might exist from class to class—and the existence of this 
rancor was, for Metternich, a principal condition of government, 
which he even fostered by making the higher classes the instruments 
of all government exactions, and thus throwing the odium upon 
them—whatever hatred the people might bear to the inferior 
officials of the State, there existed, upon the whole, little or no 
dissatisfaction with the Central Government. The Emperor was 
adored, and old Francis the First seemed to be borne out by facts, 
when, doubting of the durability of this system, he complacently 
added: ‘and yet it will hold while I live, and Metternich.” 

But there was a slow underground movement going on which 
baftled all Metternich’s efforts. The wealth and influence of the 
manufacturing and trading middle class increased. The introduction 
of machinery and steam power in manufactures upset in Austria, as 
it had done everywhere else, the old relations and vital conditions of 
whole classes of society; it changed serfs into free men, small farmers 
into manufacturing operatives; it undermined the old feudal 
trades-corporations and destroyed the means of existence of many of 
them. The new commercial and manufacturing population came 
everywhere into collision with the old feudal institutions. The middle 
classes, more and more induced by their business to travel abroad, 
introduced some mythical knowledge of the civilized countries 
situated beyond the imperial line of customs; the introduction of 
railways, finally, accelerated both the industrial and intellectual 
movement. There was, too, a dangerous part in the Austrian State 
establishment, viz.: the Hungarian feudal Constitution, with its 
parliamentary proceedings and its struggles of the impoverished and 
oppositional mass of the nobility against the Government and its 
allies, the magnates. Pressburg,* the seat of the Diet, was at the very 
gates of Vienna. All the elements contributed to create among the 
middle classes, of the towns, a spirit, not exactly of opposition, for 
opposition was as yet impossible, but of discontent; a general wish for 
reforms, more of an administrative than of a constitutional nature. 
And in the same manner as in Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy 
joined the bourgeoisie. Among this hereditary caste of officials the 
traditions of Joseph II were not forgotten; the more educated 

functionaries of the Government, who themselves sometimes 
meddled with imaginary possible reforms, by far preferred the 
progressive and intellectual despotism of that Emperor to the 
“paternal” despotism of Metternich. A portion of the poorer nobility 
equally sided with the middle class, and as to the lower classes of the 
population, who always had found plenty of grounds to complain of 
their superiors, if not of the Government, they in most cases could 
not but adhere to the reformatory wishes of the bourgeoisie. 

It was about this time, say 1843 or 1844, that a particular branch of 
literature, agreeably to this change, was established in Germany. A 
few Austrian writers, novelists, literary critics, bad poets, the whole 
of them of very indifferent ability, but gifted with that peculiar 
industrialism proper to the Jewish race, established themselves in 
Leipsic and other German towns out of Austria, and there, out of the 
reach of Metternich, published a number of books and pamphlets on 
Austrian affairs. They and their publishers made “a roaring trade” 
of it. All Germany was eager to become initiated into the secrets of 
the policy of European China; and the Austrians themselves, who 
obtained these publications by the wholesale smuggling carried on 
upon the Bohemian * frontier, were still more curious. Of course, the 
secrets let out in these publications were of no great importance, and 
the reform plans schemed out by their well-wishing authors bore the 
stamp of an innocuousness almost amounting to political virginity. A 
constitution and a free press for Austria were things considered 
unattainable; administrative reforms, extension of the rights of the 
provincial diets, admission of foreign books and newspapers, and a 
less severe censorship—the loyal and humble desires of these good 
Austrians did hardly go any further. 

At all events, the growing impossibility of preventing the literary 
intercourse of Austria with the rest of Germany, and through 
Germany with the world, contributed much toward the formation 
of an anti-governmental public opinion, and brought at least some 
little political information within the reach of part of the Austrian 
population. Thus, by the end of 1847, Austria was seized, 
although in an inferior degree, by that political and_politico- 
religious agitation which then prevailed in all Germany; and if its 
progress in Austria was more silent, it did nevertheless find 
revolutionary elements enough to work upon. There was the 
peasant, serf or feudal tenant, ground down into the dust by 
lordly or government exactions; then the factory operative, forced, 

by the stick of the policeman, to work upon any terms the 
manufacturer chose to grant; then the journeyman, debarred by 
the corporative laws from any chance of gaining an independence 
in his trade; then the merchant, stumbling, at every step in 
business, over absurd regulations; then the manufacturer, in 
uninterrupted conflict with trades-guilds jealous of their 
privileges, or with greedy and meddling officials; then the 
schoolmaster, the savant, the better educated functionary, vainly 
struggling against an ignorant and presumptuous clergy, or a 
stupid and dictating superior. In short, there was not a single class 
satisfied, for the small concessions Government was obliged now 
and then to make were made not at its own expense, for the 
Treasury could not afford that, but at the expense of the high 
aristocracy and clergy; and, as to the great bankers and 
fund-holders, the late events in Italy, the increasing opposition of 
the Hungarian Diet, and the unwonted spirit of discontent and cry 
for reform manifesting themselves all over the Empire, were not 
of a nature to strengthen their faith in the solidity and solvency of 
the Austrian Empire. 

Thus Austria, too, was marching, slowly but surely, toward a 
mighty change, when of a sudden an event broke out in France 
which at once brought down the impending storm, and gave the 
lie to old Francis’s assertion, that the building would hold out both 
during his and Metternich’s lifetime. 

London, September, 1851 

Vv