for a time at least, their resolutions upon the princes with
whom they had to contend. They, too, were cowardly, and lacked
enlarged views of revolutionary resolutions; they, too, betrayed the
people, and restored power to the hands of feudal, bureaucratic, and
military despotism. But then they were at least obliged to discuss
practical questions of immediate interest, and to live upon earth with
other people, while the Frankfort humbugs were never happier than when
they could roam in "the airy realms of dream," _im Luftreich des
Traums_. Thus the proceedings of the Berlin and Vienna Constituents
form an important part of German revolutionary history, while the
lucubrations of the Frankfort collective tomfoolery merely interest
the collector of literary and antiquarian curiosities.

The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing away with
the obnoxious territorial division that scattered and annihilated the
collective force of the nation, for some time expected to find, in the
Frankfort National Assembly at least, the beginning of a new era. But
the childish conduct of that set of wiseacres soon disenchanted the
national enthusiasm. The disgraceful proceedings occasioned by the
armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848,) made the popular indignation
burst out against a body which, it had been hoped, would give the
nation a fair field for action, and which, instead, carried away by
unequalled cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the
foundations upon which the present counter-revolutionary system is
built.

LONDON, January, 1852.

VIII.

POLES, TSCHECHS, AND GERMANS.

MARCH 5th, 1852.

From what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is already
evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March,
1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were
before this event. But such is the complicated nature of the
historical theme upon which we are trying to throw some light, that
subsequent events cannot be clearly understood without taking into
account what may be called the foreign relations of the German
Revolution. And these foreign relations were of the same intricate
nature as the home affairs.

The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale,
and Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during
the last thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater
par