who, with their constituents, had been mainly instrumental in raising
the Austrian Government from its prostration, were singularly punished
for their treachery against the European Revolution. As soon as the
Government had recovered its strength, it treated the Diet and its
Slavonian majority with the utmost contempt, and when the first
successes of the Imperial arms foreboded a speedy termination of the
Hungarian War, the Diet, on the 4th of March, was dissolved, and the
deputies dispersed by military force. Then at last the Slavonians saw
that they were duped, and then they shouted: "Let us go to Frankfort
and carry on there the opposition which we cannot pursue here!" But it
was then too late, and the very fact that they had no other
alternative than either to remain quiet or to join the impotent
Frankfort Assembly, this fact alone was sufficient to show their utter
helplessness.

Thus ended for the present, and most likely for ever, the attempts of
the Slavonians of Germany to recover an independent national
existence. Scattered remnants of numerous nations, whose nationality
and political vitality had long been extinguished, and who in
consequence had been obliged, for almost a thousand years, to follow
in the wake of a mightier nation, their conqueror, the same as the
Welsh in England, the Basques in Spain, the Bas-Bretons in France, and
at a more recent period the Spanish and French Creoles in those
portions of North America occupied of late by the Anglo-American
race--these dying nationalities, the Bohemians, Carinthians,
Dalmatians, etc., had tried to profit by the universal confusion of
1848, in order to restore their political _status quo_ of A.D. 800.
The history of a thousand years ought to have shown them that such a
retrogression was impossible; that if all the territory east of the
Elbe and Saale had at one time been occupied by kindred Slavonians,
this fact merely proved the historical tendency, and at the same time
physical and intellectual power of the German nation to subdue,
absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern neighbors; that this
tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had always been,
and still was, one of the mightiest means by which the civilization of
Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent; that it
could only cease whenever the process of Germanization had reached the
frontier of large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of an
independent national life