Debit and Credit | Page 8

classes of society. This institution it is which gives that high standard of order, duty, and military honor, and that mutual confidence between officers and men, which at the first glance distinguishes the Prussian, not only from the Russian, but the Austrian soldier. This high feeling of confidence in the national defenses is indeed peculiar to Prussia beyond the other German nations, and may be at once recognized in the manly and dignified bearing, even of the lowest classes, alike in town and country.
This spirit is depicted to the life in the striking episode of the troubles in the year 1848. Even in the wildest months of that year, when the German minority were left entirely to their own resources, this spirit of order and mutual confidence continued undisturbed. Our patriotic author has never needed to draw upon his imagination for facts, though he has depicted with consummate skill the actual reality. We feel that it has been to him a labor of love to console himself and his fellow-countrymen under so many disappointments and shattered hopes, to cherish and to strengthen that sense of independence, without which no people can stand erect among the nations.
The Prusso-German population feel it to be a mission in the cause of civilization to press forward in occupation of the Sarmatian territory--a sacred duty, which, however, can only be fulfilled by honest means, by privations and self-sacrificing exertions of every kind. In such a spirit must the work be carried forward; this is the suggestive thought with which our author's narrative concludes. It is not without a meaning, we believe, that the zealous German hero of the book is furnished with the money necessary for carrying out his schemes by a fellow-countryman and friend, who had returned to his fatherland with a fortune acquired beyond the Atlantic. Our talented author has certainly not lost sight of the fact that Germany, as a whole, has as little recovered from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War as the eastern districts of Prussia have recovered from the effects of the war with France in the present century. Let the faults and failings of our national German character be what they may (and we should like to know what nation has endured and survived similar spoliation and partition), the greatest sin of Germany during the last two hundred years, especially in the less-favored north, has always been its poverty--the condition of all classes, with few exceptions. National poverty, however, becomes indeed a political sin when a people, by its cultivation, has become constitutionally fit for freedom.
In the background of the whole picture of the disordered and sickly condition of our social circumstances here so vividly presented, the author has plainly discerned Dante's noble proverb--
"Di libertà indipendenza è primo grado."
The existence of independent citizen-families qualified and ready for every public service, though beyond the need of such employment--this is the fundamental condition of a healthy development of political freedom, alike impregnable by revolution and reaction; this is the only sure ground and basis on which a constitutional form of government can be reared and administered with advantage to every class, repressing alike successfully absolutism and democracy.
And now we have reached the point where we are enabled to gather up, and to express to the reader, without desiring to forestall his own judgment, or to load him with axioms and formulas beyond his comprehension, the beautiful fundamental idea of the book, clearly and simply.
We would express it thus: The future of all European states depends mainly on three propositions, and the politics of every statesman of our period are determined by the way in which he views them.
These propositions are,
1st. The fusion of the educated classes, and the total abolition of bureaucracy, and all social barriers between the ancient nobility and the educated classes in the nation, especially the industrial and mercantile population.
2d. The just and Christian bearing of this united body toward the working-classes, especially in towns.
3d. The recognition of the mighty fact that the educated middle classes of all nations, but especially of those of Germany, are perfectly aware that even the present, but still more the near future, is their own, if they advance along the legal path to a perfect constitutional monarchy, resisting all temptations to the right hand or to the left, not with imbittered feelings, but in the cheerful temper of a moral self-confidence.
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It is faith in truths such as these that has inspired our author in the composition of the work which is here offered to the English reading public. It is his highest praise, however, that he has imbodied this faith in a true work of art, which speaks for itself. He has thereby enkindled or strengthened a like faith in many thousand hearts, and that with