ing its dictates they would be backed by public opinion and the
Chambers; and if, on the contrary, these Chambers grew too strong,
they could readily command the power of the Diet to break down all
opposition. The Bavarian, Wuertemberg, Baden or Hanoverian
Constitutional institutions could not, under such circumstances, give
rise to any serious struggle for political power, and, therefore, the
great bulk of the German middle class kept very generally aloof from
the petty squabbles raised in the Legislatures of the small States,
well knowing that without a fundamental change in the policy and
constitution of the two great powers of Germany, no secondary efforts
and victories would be of any avail. But, at the same time, a race of
Liberal lawyers, professional oppositionists, sprung up in these small
assemblies: the Rottecks, the Welckers, the Roemers, the Jordans, the
Stueves, the Eisenmanns, those great "popular men" (_Volksmaenner_) who,
after a more or less noisy, but always unsuccessful, opposition of
twenty years, were carried to the summit of power by the revolutionary
springtide of 1848, and who, after having there shown their utter
impotency and insignificance, were hurled down again in a moment.
These first specimen upon German soil of the trader in politics and
opposition, by their speeches and writings made familiar to the German
ear the language of Constitutionalism, and by their very existence
foreboded the approach of a time when the middle class would seize
upon and restore to their proper meaning political phrases which these
talkative attorneys and professors were in the habit of using without
knowing much about the sense originally attached to them.

German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political
excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of
1830. A crude Constitutionalism, or a still cruder Republicanism, were
preached by almost all writers of the time. It became more and more
the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of literati, to make up
for the want of cleverness in their productions, by political
allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels,
reviews, the drama, every literary production teemed with what was
called "tendency," that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an
anti-governmental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas
reigning after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political
opposition there were mixe