the former an impetuous and able speaker, who united strong Romanist religious sympathies with extreme popular opinions -the other, the author of that famous pamphlet of which we have spoken above, and which had been to the Prussian revolution what the tract of the Abbé Siéyès on the Tiers Etat had been to that of France. This section leant to republican ideas.

Next to it, but separated by a real though narrow division, stood the "left centre," which was led by Rodbertus, and was distinctly anti-republican, although determined to carry out to their fullest logical consequences the concessions made by the king in the month of March, and to turn the old absolutist Prussia into a limited monarchy governed on advanced liberal principles. To this section also belonged Schulze-Delitzsch, of whom we shall have something to say hereafter.

The true "centre" was led by Von Unruh, who was for some time speaker, and whose name was associated with the last adventures of the short-lived and unfortunate body over which he presided.

The "right" numbered amongst its foremost names the gifted Catholic lawyer August Reichensperger, well known as a passionate lover of Gothic architecture, and the celebrated Protestant preachers Jonas and Sydow, both names to be had in honour, and the last of whom is still closely connected with the liberal Protestantische Kirchen-Zeitung, and represents the traditions of Schleiermacher in the pulpit of Berlin.

On the whole, however, there was less ability in the Assembly than might have been expected, and, above all, there was a deplorable want of political experience and tact. The successive ministries which had to deal with it were not more skilful. The so-called "transition" ministry of Camphausen, which was called into existence on the 29th of March, gave way in the course of the summer to the Hansemann cabinet, which called itself somewhat self-consciously the "ministry of action." When the king had begun to despair of any good results being attained by the National Assembly, and the intriguers who surrounded him had cast their eyes on Wrangel and his battalions, whom they regarded as the destined means of restoring the old state of things, the Hansemann ministry was succeeded by that of General von Pfuel, and that again in a few weeks by that of the king's half-brother Count Brandenburg, who on the 9th of November announced to the assembled deputies that their sittings were adjourned to the 27th, and that their next meeting was to be held, not at Berlin, but at Brandenburg. We need not follow the Assembly through its last inglorious days. On the 11th the national guard was disbanded, on the 12th the state of siege was proclaimed at Berlin, and on the 5th Decem

ber the National Assembly was dissolved and the new Constitution announced.

Arrived at the end of the revolutionary and at the opening of the reactionary period, we may pause, and ask whether the Prussian people had gained any thing by the agitations and losses of 1848. The answer must be in the affirmative. The Constitution of the 5th of December was not by any means perfect, and some of the modifications introduced into it in the years which followed were far from being improvements; but the step in advance was not the less great and real. It was more than worth the blood which had been shed and the property which had been wasted.

The dissolution of the National Assembly had been pronounced by M. Manteuffel; and as it was his influence which was in the ascendant during the whole of the reaction, this is the proper place to say a few words about him. The Freiherr Otto von Manteuffel was born in Lusatia in 1805, and belongs to an ancient family. He entered the Prussian bureaucracy early in life, and rose rapidly through all its grades, giving ever new proofs of his diligence, his attorney-like acuteness, and his knowledge of administrative detail. In the Landtag of 1847 he defended the bureaucratic method of government against the advocates of the parliamentary system; and when he came into power in the end of 1848, he lost no time in showing that he regarded himself simply as a servant of the Crown, and that he was absolutely indifferent to the opinion of the parliamentary majority. Those who have read the Gespräche aus der Gegenwart (Conversations from the Present") of Radowitz-which is, we may remark in passing, one of the best helps to understanding the state of things in Germany on the eve of 1848will remember the character of Eder. M. Manteuffel was the spokesman of all the Eder class; the bureaucrat par excellence. He is a man of few illusions and of no high aims. He was clearsighted enough to understand that the Kreuzzeitung party was an anachronism, but he could not reconcile himself to an honest constitutional policy. There is something mean and underhand in the nature of the man, as there is something singularly dry and unattractive in his manner. His favourite weapon is intrigue, and his favourite department is the police. To keep his own place and to advance his own fortune, was his first object; to prevent sudden changes and to keep things quiet, was his second aim.

The first parliament elected under the new Constitution assembled in the beginning of 1849; but the Second Chamber was dissolved in the month of April, chiefly on account of its vote against the maintenance of the state of siege. Before

allowing the elections to proceed, a new electoral law was enacted by the simple process of a royal edict; and the democratic party, seeing that it had no chance of success, retired from the contest, and brought forward no more candidates till 1861.

When the new Chamber met in August, it was found that the ministers had not been mistaken in their calculations. The reactionists were in a decided majority, and immediately proceeded to revise the Constitution in an anti-liberal sense. When their labours were finished, the revised Constitution was laid before the king. In the first days of 1850, he replied by a message, in which he asked for further concessions. The Chambers took the royal proposals into consideration, accepted some, and rejected others. At last a compromise was arrived at, and the king, with much solemnity, swore to the Constitution in the Rittersaal of the palace at Berlin. In a speech which he delivered on the occasion, he explained the reason which had led him to proclaim the much more liberal Constitution of December 1848, in which, however, it must be remarked, stood a clause which enabled him to issue edicts having the force of law. He then thanked the Chambers for having revised his own work, and diminished its dangerous liberalism.

The "German question," in the mean time, grew ever more important. Prussia, which had definitively broken with the Frankfort Parliament, and had given up all hopes of obtaining the hegemony of the whole of Germany, had been trying plan after plan for a smaller federation, in which she might have the undisputed lead. Alliances quickly made and as quickly broken, a congress and a college of princes, a parliament at Gotha, and what not, the affairs of the Germanic confederacy in 1849 and 1850, are not a labyrinth into which our readers would thank us for conducting them. Suffice it to say, that in December 1850 the question presented itself in the form of submission to the dictates of Austria and peace, or adherence to the Germanic pretensions of Prussia and war. Brandenburg died of chagrin. Radowitz was dismissed. Manteuffel was not the man to play double or quits; he hurried to Olmütz, and gave up every thing.

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The disaster of Olmütz soon led, by way of the Dresden Congress, to its natural result, the reëstablishment of the federal relations which had been overturned in 1848, and the revival of that ill-contrived body the Frankfort Diet, which one of the most rising of German statesmen, M. de Roggenbach, has aptly called "the contradiction of thirty-five wills." In internal as well as external affairs the party of reaction grew ever bolder. M. Manteuffel declared in so many words, in the first days of 1851, that the government meant to break finally with the revolution. M. von Westphalen, who repre

sented in the cabinet the feudal section of the conservative party, called once more into life the old provincial assemblies, which all Europe had thought finally laid to rest by the legislation of the previous year. The journey of the king to meet the Emperor Nicholas at Warsaw added to the uneasiness of the liberals, and the coup-d'état of the 2d of December in France encouraged the pamphleteers of M. Manteuffel to call loudly for a new revision of the Constitution. The year 1852 brought no change for the better, except in so far as it showed more distinctly the diversity of opinion between the two halves of the dominant party; Manteuffel and the bureaucratic conservatives looking across the Rhine for a line of conduct to imitate, and the feudalists vehemently denouncing the French ruler, and reserving their sympathies for the Emperor of Russia, who visited Berlin in the month of May. The elections, which took place in the autumn, were so managed by the government that very few liberals were returned; and the power of the reactionists, from this time to the end of 1857, was modified only by their internal dissensions, and by the presence in the lower House of a powerful body of Catholic representatives, who frequently voted with the opposition, to subserve the special interests of their coreligionists.

The negotiations which preceded the Russian war, and that war itself, diverted for a considerable period the attention of Prussian liberals from their internal affairs. They had given up all hope of a speedy change for the better at home; but they trusted that if the government could be forced into siding with the Western powers, a new turn would be given to the fancies of the king. The nation was soon divided into three parties, -the liberals of all shades desiring an alliance with France and England; the feudal faction urging the government to assist Russia; and Manteuffel's adherents determined to uphold the neutrality of Prussia at any sacrifice.

The name of the Kreuzzeitung party became now for the first time familiar to Europe. This name was, as many of our readers are aware, given to the feudalists in consequence of their having for their principal organ the newspaper started to assist the reaction, and called the Neue Preussische Zeitung, but which, in order to show its orthodoxy, bore a large black cross on its first_page. The leaders of this party were Stahl and Gerlach. The former, who is recently dead, was originally a Jew, but changed his religion at seventeen. He was born in 1802, at Munich, and studied chiefly at the small Bavarian university of Erlangen. In time he became a professor there, and was summoned thence to Berlin in 1840 by Frederick William IV., for whom his Biblico-juristical mysticism had a

great fascination. From first to last Stahl's influence was simply mischievous; intolerant and obscurantist, he would, if he had appeared earlier on the scene, have been a most dangerous counsellor; but the cause of religious liberty was virtually gained in Prussia before he arose. As it was, he and his friends did infinite evil.

Otto von Gerlach, and his brother the general, were devoted to the same cause. The name of the latter was mixed up with the disgraceful intrigues by which the Kreuzzeitung faction tried to support their influence at court, and of which so much was said in the papers of the day, in connexion with the names of the spies Lindenberg and Techen. Otto von Gerlach is a man of great although misused ability. He was born in 1795, and is sprung from a respectable family, but one which by no means belongs to the old gentry, whose cause he has always supported. He served in the war of independence, and after its conclusion entered the bureaucracy. Unlike Manteuffel, however, his nature is not bureaucratic. Nay, rather he is the enemy of centralisation, the friend of local government. The government which he prefers is not, however, self-government, but that of an infinite number of petty despots-a parish and county government, administered by squires and parsons. From the first he has been consistent. Already, forty years ago, he contributed to a newspaper which took for its motto, "Not counter-revolution, but the contrary of revolution ;" and before 1848 he got into great trouble with the bourgeoisie for maintaining that only men of noble birth should be permitted to be officers in the army. He would have the nobles gathered into chapters, the citizens gathered into guilds, and all things as like the golden days of the German middle age as they well can be. He is a friend to England, but it is the old church-and-king England of which he thinks. He dislikes the autocratic system of Russia, but leans to her as a friend of order, and sympathised with her during the Crimean war. A ready and powerful debater, he was ever at the breach attacking the Constitution, and holding aloft the banner of "German Right and Evangelical Christianity."

The liberals at this time were led by Vincke, one of whose speeches made a great sensation in England in 1854. The descendant of an old Westphalian house, the Freiherr von Vincke was born in 1811. His father, and most of his ancestors, had been in the bureaucracy, and the young Vincke, after studying at Göttingen and elsewhere, was for some time a judge. Perhaps, however, his most valuable training was gained in the provincial assemblies, and when he appeared in the United Landtag of 1847 he was already an orator. He

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