This particular reform, far from staying the movement towards uniform import duties, only accelerated it. A General Association of German Manufacturers and Merchants was founded at Frankfort in 1819 to urge confederation upon the Government. The agitation was inspired by Friedrich List. He had been for a short time professor at Tübingen and was already well known as a journalist. He was nominated general secretary of the association, and became the soul of the movement. He wrote endless petitions and articles, and made personal application to the various Governments at Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Vienna. He was anxious that Austria should take the lead. But all in vain. The Federal Assembly, hostile as it was to every manifestation of public opinion, refused to reply to the petition of the merchants and manufacturers. List himself was soon taken up with other interests. He was named as the deputy for Reutlingen, his native town, in the state of Würtemberg, in 1820, but was banished from the Assembly and condemned to ten months’ imprisonment for criticising the bureaucracy of his own country. After seeking refuge in France he spent a few years travelling in England and Switzerland, and then returned to Würtemberg, where he again suffered imprisonment. Upon his release from prison he resolved to emigrate to America, where Lafayette, whom he had met in Paris, promised him a warm welcome. Returning to Germany in 1832, after having made numerous friends and accumulated a fortune, he found the tariff movement for which he had struggled thirteen years before just coming to a head. It was to be established, however, in a fashion quite different from what he had expected. It was not to be a general reform, and Austria was not to be leader. Prussia was to be the pivot of the movement, which was to be accomplished by means of a series of general agreements. In 1828 there were formed almost simultaneously two Tariff Unions, the one between Bavaria and Würtemberg, the other between Prussia and Hesse-Darmstadt. Within the areas of both of these unions goods were to circulate freely, and a common rate of duty was to be established at the frontiers. From the very first there was a _rapprochement_ between the unions, but a definite fusion in one Zollverein was only decided upon on March 22, 1833. The new _régime_ actually came into being on January 1, 1834. Even before that date Saxony and some of the other states had already joined the new union.