ke their stand openly and decidedly with
the insurrection, to give it, thereby, whatever strength legality
could confer upon it, while they themselves at once acquired an army
for their own defence. They had to summon the Central Power to stop
all hostilities at once; and if, as could be foreseen, this power
neither could nor would do so, to depose it at once and put another
more energetic Government in its place. If insurgent troops could not
be brought to Frankfort (which, in the beginning, when the State
Governments were little prepared and still hesitating, might have been
easily done), then the Assembly could have adjourned at once to the
very center of the insurgent district. All this done at once, and
resolutely, not later than the middle or end of May, might have opened
chances both for the insurrection and for the National Assembly.

But such a determined course was not to be expected from the
representatives of German shopocracy. These aspiring statesmen were
not at all freed from their illusions. Those members who had lost
their fatal belief in the strength and inviolability of the Parliament
had already taken to their heels; the Democrats who remained, were not
so easily induced to give up dreams of power and greatness which they
had cherished for a twelvemonth. True to the course they had hitherto
pursued, they shrank back from decisive action until every chance of
success, nay, every chance to succumb, with at least the honors of
war, had passed away. In order, then, to develop a fictitious,
busy-body sort of activity, the sheer impotency of which, coupled with
its high pretension, could not but excite pity and ridicule, they
continued insinuating resolutions, addresses, and requests to an
Imperial Lieutenant, who not even noticed them; to ministers who were
in open league with the enemy. And when at last William Wolff, member
for Striegan, one of the editors of the _New Rhenish Gazette_, the
only really revolutionary man in the whole Assembly, told them that if
they meant what they said, they had better give over talking, and
declare the Imperial Lieutenant, the chief traitor to the country, an
outlaw at once; then the entire compressed virtuous indignation of
these parliamentary gentlemen burst out with an energy which they
never found when the Government heaped insult after insult upon them.

Of course, for Wolff's proposition was the first sensible word spoken
within the walls of St. Paul's Church; of