its wealth, and seeking influence from its power, with cutting repulsion
and contempt. The fact, however, is as stated; the most active
revolutionary spirits engaged in the task of pulling down and
destroying, as far as was possible, have been every where the Jews; the
avowed republicans may chiefly be found among men of their persuasion;
the clamour, the attack, and the denunciation, chiefly still proceed
from Jewish mouths and Jewish pens. Those who now march forward, then,
the most boldly, hand in hand in strange conjunction, along the
precipitous path of revolutionary movement, are the students and the
Jews. If you unwisely allow one of the latter to lay hold of an unlucky
button of your coat in a steamboat, he will be sure to endeavour, with
his peculiar twang, to insinuate into you all the wildest
ultra-revolutionary doctrines: the former will keep more apart from you,
and herd in knots; but, when they get drunk, instead of vapouring vague,
incomprehensible, _soi-disant_ Kantian philosophy, as of yore, they will
bellow still more vague and incomprehensible political theories about
United Germany. It is these two classes of beings, then, who make the
most ostentatious parade of the national cockades that flash across our
eyesight.
The fate of this cockade has been a very strange one, by the way, in
latter years. The red, black, and gold combination was long formally
proscribed in universities, as deleterious and dangerous, and typical of
the forbidden _Burschenschaften_: it was worn only in secret and by
stealth, by recalcitrant would-be revolutionary students. All on a
sudden it has been raised on high in flag and banner, waving not only in
revolutionary procession, but from palace walls, and tops of public
buildings. The cockade has not only been authorised, but enjoined; and
in a late reactionary movement in Berlin,—when, out of jealousy and
spite towards a central power, that had chosen its executive head from
southern and not northern Germany, a considerable public feeling was
exhibited against the imperial national flag, and in favour of the
Prussian colours exclusively—the government, or rather the king himself,
was obliged, for fear of an outbreak of the students, to command the
resumption of those colours in flag and cockade, which, but a little
while ago, he himself had proscribed. The pride of the young
_soi-disant_ heroes at being openly able to parade that symbol which
they cherished only heretofore as fancied conspirators, may be easily
conceived: and, now these boy-men find that they can dictate to the
princes of the earth, not only upon the matter of flags and cockades,
but upon matters of far graver note, there is no knowing to what height
of presumption this pride may not still further lead them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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