f the first rulers to grant such a
constitution to his people was the Grand Duke who presided over the
little court at Weimar.

The mass of the people were wholly indifferent. The intellectuals were
divided among themselves. The schools and universities after 1818 form
associations and societies, the Burschenschaft, for example, and in a
hazy professorial fashion talk and shout of freedom. They were of
those passionate lovers of liberty, more intent on the dower than on
the bride; willing to talk and sing and to tell the world of their own
deserts, but with little iron in their blood.

When a real man wants to be free he fights, he does not talk; he takes
what he wants and asks for it afterward; he spends himself first and
affords it afterward. These dreamy gentlemen could never make the
connection between their assertions and their actions. They were as
inconsistent, as a man who sees nothing unreasonable in circulating
ascetic opinions and a perambulator at the same time. They were dreary
and technical advocates of liberty.

At a great festival at the Wartburg, in 1817, the students got out of
hand, burned the works of those conservatives, Haller and Kotzebue,
and the Code Napoleon. This youthful folly was purposely exaggerated
throughout Germany, and was used by the party of autocracy to frighten
the people, and also as a reason for passing even severer laws against
the ebullitions of liberty. At a conference at Carlsbad in 1819 the
representatives of the states there assembled passed severe laws
against the student societies, the press, the universities, and the
liberal professors.

From 1815-1830 the opinions of the more enlightened changed. The fear
of Napoleon was gradually forgotten, and the hatred of the absolutism
of Prussia and Austria grew.

In 1830 constitutions were demanded and were guardedly granted in
Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Cassel. In 1832 things had gone
so far that at a great student festival the black, red, and gold flag
of the Burschenschaft was hoisted, toasts were drunk to the
sovereignty of the people, to the United States of Germany, and to
Europe Republican! This was followed by further prosecutions. Prussia
condemned thirty-nine students to death, but confined them in a
fortress. The prison-cell of the famous Fritz Reuter may be seen in
Berlin to-day. In Hesse, the chief of the liberal party, Jordan, was
condemned to six years in prison; in Bavaria a journalist was
impris