What would revolutionising Germany be at? It is a question easily put, but very difficult to answer. The old joke, lately “freshed-up” to be applied to the French—namely, that “they don’t know what they want, and won’t be easy till they get it,” may, with still deeper truth, be applied to the Germans. In spite of much inquiring conversation with all men of all ranks, and in all positions of life, it has been quite impossible for an unimaginative English understanding to discover exactly, in the midst of all the vague rhapsody, florid discourse, and poetical politics with which it has been assailed, “what they want.” To judge by the fermenting spirit every where prevalent, the bombastic and unpractical dreams—for plans they are not—formed as regards the future, it would be difficult also not to suppose that “they won’t be easy till they get it.” What would revolutionising Germany be at? In spite of all one sees and hears, or rather does not hear, it is impossible not to recur to the question again and again; for, after all, in Germany we are among thinking men, and, children as they may be in political life, _thinking men_ they _are_; and, surely, thinking men must have some definite end and aim to which their thoughts, their hopes, their aspirations, and their efforts are directed. All the Utopian schemes, all the unpractical theories of all parties, who put themselves forward in the revolutionary movement, be their tendencies monarchic, constitutional, or republican, aspire, then, to the setting up of the ill-defined idol of modern German political fancies—“German unity”—“One great and powerful united Germany”—“One great united German Empire”—or whatever name, designation, or varied shade of name the idol, whose pedestal is “Union,” may bear. This was the great fancied panacea for all evils, for which men clamoured, when, in imitation of that distracted city of Paris—so worthy of imitation, forsooth!—they got up revolutions, and tried their hands at building barricades. This has been, in truth, long since the watchword of the German student, when, in the recesses of his beer-cellar at the university, he collected a set of fellow _fancied_ enthusiasts around the beer-jugs, imagined this species of club to be a wonderful conspiracy, because he designated it by the forbidden name of “_Burschenschaft_,” and deemed himself a notable and formidable conspirator, because he drank off his _krug_ of beer to the cry of “Perish all Princes—_es lebe hoch das Deutsche Vaterland_!” The princes, by the way, were highly complimentary to such conspirators, in considering them dangerous, and forbidding the existence of the _Burschenschaften_, which were pretty safety-valves enough to let off the exuberance of studentic steam. Whether the cry for a “United Germany” first proceeded again from the mouths of these fantastic enthusiasts, who, when they found out, to their surprise, that the parts