at of the same class in
England, and who in all cases lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the
slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of the
agricultural population, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants,
and the agricultural laborers, never troubled their heads much about
politics before the Revolution, but it is evident that this event must
have opened to them a new career, full of brilliant prospects. To
every one of them the Revolution offered advantages, and the movement
once fairly engaged in, it was to be expected that each, in their
turn, would join it. But at the same time it is quite as evident, and
equally borne out by the history of all modern countries, that the
agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great
space, and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement among any
considerable portion of it, never can attempt a successful
independent movement; they require the initiatory impulse of the more
concentrated, more enlightened, more easily moved people of the towns.

The preceding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which
in their aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the
recent movements, will already be sufficient to explain a great part
of the incoherence, incongruence, and apparent contradiction which
prevailed in that movement. When interests so varied, so conflicting,
so strangely crossing each other, are brought into violent collision;
when these contending interests in every district, every province, are
mixed in different proportions; when, above all, there is no great
centre in the country, no London, no Paris, the decisions of which, by
their weight, may supersede the necessity of fighting out the same
quarrel over and over again in every single locality; what else is to
be expected but that the contest will dissolve itself into a mass of
unconnected struggles, in which an enormous quantity of blood, energy,
and capital is spent, but which for all that remain without any
decisive results?

The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or
less important principalities is equally explained by this confusion
and multiplicity of the elements which compose the nation, and which
again vary in every locality. Where there are no common interests
there can be no unity of purpose, much less of action. The German
Confederation, it is true, was declared everlastingly indissoluble;
yet the Confederation, and its