the principal requirements of the people.

What they were to represent to the king as urgently necessary was: The
withdrawal of the military force, the organization of an armed citizen
guard, the granting of an unconditional freedom of the press, which had
been promised for a lifetime, and the calling of the General Assembly. I
shall return to the address later.

CHAPTER IX. THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH.

THE 17th passed so quietly that hopes of a peaceable outcome of the
fateful conflict began to awake. My own recollections confirm this.

People believed so positively that the difficulty would be adjusted,
that in the forenoon of the 18th my mother sent my eldest sister Martha
to her drawing-lesson, which was given at General Baeyer's, in the
Friedrichstrasse.

Ludo and I went to school, and when it was over the many joyful faces in
the street confirmed what we had heard during the school hours.

The king had granted the Constitution and the "freedom of the press."

Crowds were collected in front of the placards which announced this
fact, but there was no need to force our way through; their contents
were read aloud at every corner and fountain.

One passer-by repeated it to another, and friend shouted to friend
across the street. "Have you heard the news?" was the almost invariable
question when people accosted one another, and at least one "Thank God!"
was contained in every conversation. Two or three older acquaintances
whom we met charged us, in all haste, to tell our mother; but she had
heard it already, and her joy was so great that she forgot to scold us
for staying away so long. Fraulein Lamperi, on the contrary, who dined
with us, wept. She was convinced that the unfortunate king had been
forced into something which would bring ruin both to him and his
subjects. "His poor Majesty!" she sobbed in the midst of our joy.

Our mother loved the king too, but she was a daughter of the free
Netherlands; two of her brothers and sisters lived in England; and
the friends she most valued, whom she knew to be warmly and faithfully
attached to the house of Hohenzollern, thought it high time that the
Prussian people attained the majority to which that day had brought
them. Moreover, her active mind knew no rest till it had won a clear
insight into questions concerning the times and herself. So she had
reached the conviction that no peace between king and people could be
expected unless a constitution was granted.