in which
Germany was involved, and which were fought on her soil, from the
sixteenth century to the present day. It was this want of numbers, and
particularly of anything like concentrated numbers, which prevented
the German middle classes from attaining that political supremacy
which the English bourgeoisie has enjoyed ever since 1688, and which
the French conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the wealth,
and with the wealth the political importance of the middle class in
Germany, was continually growing. Governments were, although
reluctantly, compelled to bow, at least to its more immediate material
interests. It may even be truly said that from 1815 to 1830, and from
1832 to 1840, every particle of political influence, which, having
been allowed to the middle class in the constitutions of the smaller
States, was again wrested from them during the above two periods of
political reaction, that every such particle was compensated for by
some more practical advantage allowed to them. Every political defeat
of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of commercial
legislation. And certainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818,
and the formation of the Zollverein,[5] were worth a good deal more to
the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of
expressing in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom their want of
confidence in ministers who laughed at their votes. Thus, with
growing wealth and extending trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a
stage where it found the development of its most important interests
checked by the political constitution of the country; by its random
division among thirty-six princes with conflicting tendencies and
caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade
connected with it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant
and presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the
same time the extension and consolidation of the Zollverein, the
general introduction of steam communication, the growing competition
in the home trade, brought the commercial classes of the different
States and Provinces closer together, equalized their interests and
centralized their strength. The natural consequence was the passing of
the whole mass of them into the camp of the Liberal Opposition, and
the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German middle class
for political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the
moment