rately filled State Treasury. In two years every trace of a
surplus was spent in court festivals, royal progresses, largesses,
subventions to needy, seedy, and greedy noblemen, etc., and the
regular taxes were no longer sufficient for the exigencies of either
Court or Government. And thus His Majesty found himself very soon
placed between a glaring deficit on one side, and a law of 1820 on the
other, by which any new loan, or any increase of the then existing
taxation was made illegal without the assent of "the future
Representation of the People." This representation did not exist; the
new King was less inclined than even his father to create it; and if
he had been, he knew that public opinion had wonderfully changed since
his accession.

Indeed, the middle classes, who had partly expected that the new King
would at once grant a Constitution, proclaim the Liberty of the Press,
Trial by Jury, etc., etc.--in short, himself take the lead of that
peaceful revolution which they wanted in order to obtain political
supremacy--the middle classes had found out their error, and had
turned ferociously against the King. In the Rhine Provinces, and more
or less generally all over Prussia, they were so exasperated that
they, being short themselves of men able to represent them in the
Press, went to the length of an alliance with the extreme
philosophical party, of which we have spoken above. The fruit of this
alliance was the _Rhenish Gazette_ of Cologne,[6] a paper which was
suppressed after fifteen months' existence, but from which may be
dated the existence of the Newspaper Press in Germany. This was in
1842.

The poor King, whose commercial difficulties were the keenest satire
upon his Mediaeval propensities, very soon found out that he could not
continue to reign without making some slight concession to the popular
outcry for that "Representation of the People," which, as the last
remnant of the long-forgotten promises of 1813 and 1815, had been
embodied in the law of 1820. He found the least objectionable mode of
satisfying this untoward law in calling together the Standing
Committees of the Provincial Diets. The Provincial Diets had been
instituted in 1823. They consisted for every one of the eight
provinces of the kingdom:--(1) Of the higher nobility, the formerly
sovereign families of the German Empire, the heads of which were
members of the Diet by birthright. (2) Of the representatives of the
knights, or lower nobility