lain to every one that the
Parliament of all Germany was impotent to enforce its decrees against
one of the German Powers possessed of a preponderating military
strength. By the end of 1848 the revolution in Vienna was completely
crushed and a strongly reactionary Government appointed by the new
Emperor. Meanwhile in Berlin the Junkers and the reactionaries
generally had already again come into power, a crisis having been
caused by the attempt of the democratic section of the Prussian
National Assembly, convened by the King in March, to reorganize the
army on a popular democratic basis. We need scarcely say the Prussian
army has been the tool of Junkerdom and reaction ever since.

The last despairing attempt of the Frankfurt Parliament to give effect
to the national Germanic unity, which all patriotic Germans professed
to be eager for, was the offer of the Imperial crown to the King of
Prussia. Against this act, however, nearly half the members--i.e. all
the advanced parties in the Assembly--protested by refusing to take
any part in it They had also declined to be associated with a previous
motion for the exclusion of German Austria from the new national
unity, in the interest of Prussian ascendancy. Both these reactionary
proposals, as we all know, at a later date became the corner-stones of
the new Prusso-German unity of Bismark's creation. On this occasion,
however, the Prussian King refused to accept the office at the hands
of the impotent Frankfurt Assembly, which latter soon afterwards broke
up and eventually "petered out." Meanwhile Prussian troops, led by the
reactionary military caste, were employed in the congenial task of
suppressing popular movements with the sword in Baden, Saxony, and
Prussia itself.

The two rival bulwarks of reaction, Prussia and Austria, were now so
alarmed at the revolutionary dangers they had passed through that, for
the nonce forgetting their rivalry, they cordially joined together in
reviving, in the interests of the counter-revolution, the old
reactionary Federal Assembly, which had never been formally dissolved,
as it ought to have been on the election of the Frankfurt Parliament.
Reaction now went on apace. Liberties were curtailed and rights gained
in 1848 were abolished in most of the smaller States. Henceforth the
Federal Assembly became the theatre of the two great rival powers of
the Germanic Confederation. Both alike strove desperately for the
hegemony of Germany. The str