sy, at
that early period of the Revolution. But that would have been
expecting a great deal too much from an Assembly composed in its
majority of Liberal attorneys and _doctrinaire_ professors, an
Assembly which, while it pretended to embody the very essence of
German intellect and science, was in reality nothing but a stage where
old and worn-out political characters exhibited their involuntary
ludicrousness and their impotence of thought, as well as action,
before the eyes of all Germany. THIS Assembly of old women was, from
the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular
movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German
Governments put together. It deliberated under the eyes of the Diet,
nay, it almost craved the Diet's sanction to its decrees, for its
first resolutions had to be promulgated by that odious body. Instead
of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion
of any such dangerous question. Instead of surrounding itself by a
popular force, it passed to the order of the day over all the violent
encroachments of the Governments; Mayence, under its very eyes, was
placed in a state of siege, and the people there disarmed, and the
National Assembly did not stir. Later on it elected Archduke John of
Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its resolutions were
to have the force of law; but then Archduke John was only instituted
in his new dignity after the consent of all the Governments had been
obtained, and he was instituted not by the Assembly, but by the Diet;
and as to the legal force of the decrees of the Assembly, that point
was never recognized by the larger Governments, nor enforced by the
Assembly itself; it therefore remained in suspense. Thus we had the
strange spectacle of an Assembly pretending to be the only legal
representative of a great and sovereign nation, and yet never
possessing either the will or the force to make its claims recognized.
The debates of this body, without any practical result, were not even
of any theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the
most hackneyed commonplace themes of superannuated philosophical and
juridical schools; every sentence that was said, or rather stammered
forth, in that Assembly having been printed a thousand times over, and
a thousand times better, long before.

Thus the pretended new central authority of Germany left everything as
it had found it. So far from realizing the lo