n proclamations and promises, a patent was
addressed to the new Saxon provinces granting a national _Landtag_, or
Diet, for the whole country. The drawing up of the Constitution thus
proclaimed in principle gave rise to heated conflicts. There was, as
yet, no proletariat proper in Prussia, and for that matter hardly any
in the rest of Germany. The handicraft system of production, and even
the mediaeval guild system, slightly modified, prevailed throughout the
country. The middle class proper was small and unimportant, and hence
Liberalism, the theoretical expression of that class, only found
articulate utterance through men of the professions.

The new Prussian territories in the west were largely tinctured with
progressive ideas originating in the French Revolution, while the east
was dominated by reactionary feudal landowners, the notorious Junker
class--a class special to East Prussian territories, including the
eastern portion of the Mark of Brandenburg--whom the moderate
Conservative Minister Stein himself characterized as "heartless,
wooden, half-educated people, only good to turn into corporals or
calculating-machines." This class then, as ever since, opposed an
increase of popular control and the progress of free institutions with
might and main. Friction arose between the Government and Liberal
gymnastic societies and students' clubs. This culminated in the
festival on the Wartburg in October 1818, when a bonfire was made of a
book of police laws and Uhlan stays and a corporal's stick. It was
followed the next year by the assassination of the dramatist and
political spy Kotzebue by the student Sand.

Panic seized the reactionists, and the Austrian Minister Metternich,
one of the chief pillars of absolutist principles in Europe, induced
the King to commit himself to the Austrian system of repression. In
1821 the Reactionary party succeeded in getting the projected
Constitution abandoned and the bureaucratic system of provincial
estates established by royal warrant two years later (1823). The
Prussian police with their spies then became omnipotent, and a
remorseless persecution of all holding Liberal or democratic views
ensued, the best-known writers on the popular side no less than the
rank and file being arbitrarily arrested and kept in prison on any or
no pretext. The amalgamation of the new districts into the Prussian
bureaucratic system was not accomplished without resistance. The Rhine
provinces especiall