ive the replies he--an utterly unknown,
unimportant enlisted man--made to captains, colonels, and generals. Any
such answer would soon have brought down the punishment prescribed by the
articles of war for insubordination.

In later life Seume paid dearly for the sins of his youth,--and he did not
atone for them by publishing his own autobiography. He had no reason to
find fault with the Hessian service; it was only after he had left it
that his real troubles began. It is well known how Prussia for eighty
years tyrannized over Northern Germany, weighing heavily on its
overburdened people, threatening them until Hanover, Brunswick, Hesse,
Saxony, and Poland were all forced to forbid its enlistment of men within
their borders. It was during these trying times that Seume was taken by
force to Emden, in East Prussia, and there put into a Prussian regiment as
a common soldier. Twice he deserted,--once when he was on duty as a
sentry,--and he was condemned by court-martial to the awful penalty of
running the gauntlet, the whipping by a whole line of soldiers. He
escaped, finally, by violating his parole. In his Prussian uniform he paid
the penalty for the oath to the Hessian flag which he had broken first.

* * * * *

NOTE.--This pamphlet is a disguised attack on the Prussia of 1866 for
seizing and holding Hesse-Cassel, along with Hanover and Brunswick, as
part of its own kingdom, driving the Elector of Cassel and the King of
Hanover into exile. The author is clearly a champion of the lost cause,
and seeks to justify it by rewriting the history of Hesse and Prussia of a
hundred years before. He aims at elevating the claims of the Hessian
electoral family in the eyes of their former subjects and of the rest of
the world, and in depreciating the part taken by Prussia both at the time
of the American War of Independence and in enlarging its own borders and
increasing its power at the expense of the small sovereign states of
Germany, whose princes opposed the aggression of Prussia and its claim to
control the whole of Germany. It was the beginning of that series of
advances which culminated in the establishment of the German Empire as the
outcome of the war with France in 1870. Having crushed out all opposition
within and near its borders, having driven the Elector of Hesse away and
forced the King of Hanover into a hopeless resistance, Prussia granted its
permission to Baden and Bavaria and Hesse-