rdant elements
continued to ferment in secret. In Germany the principles and doctrines
which had become triumphant in France were subjected to the most free
and vigorous discussion. The German spirit of philosophical speculation
had never sunk into the dogmatical materialism of the French school.
The monstrous caricatures exhibited by the understanding, when relying
on its unassisted powers it undertook to build the future on the
destruction of the past, drew the attention of the deepest thinkers to
the fundamental errours of the moral and political theory then for the
first time brought into action. To avert its immediate practical
consequences was left to the vigilance of the great and the steady
attachments of the people. The more important intellectual struggle
against the theory itself was carried on, in every direction and with
every species of literary armour, by the most powerful minds which at
this critical epoch were rising to maturity.

But the exertions of individuals, however highly gifted and even
closely united, are never sufficient to effect any important and
durable change in the temper of a nation. They are themselves borne
along with the current of the age, and may see and announce, but cannot
control its course. Even the most striking lessons of foreign
experience are lost upon a people; it gains wisdom and strength only by
its own sufferings and actions. The moral and political regeneration of
Germany was to spring out of the lowest depth of national calamity and
humiliation. Under the hardest pressure of a foreign tyranny, which had
grown mighty by their errours and distractions, and which applied its
whole power, directed by a systematic and relentless policy, to destroy
all the remains of their strength, all the links of their union, all
the memorials of their greatness, the name of their country became once
more dear to the Germans. They began to look back with affectionate
reverence to its remote antiquity, to the early promise of its infancy,
to the feats of its sportive and vigorous youth; its history,
constitution and language were investigated with an ardent and
indefatigable interest; the monuments and relics of its happier days
were anxiously drawn out of the dust of oblivion; every fragment
connecting the present with the past, which had escaped the general
wreck, was attentively examined and carefully guarded. The masterpieces
of native art once more received the tribute of admiration,