Let us enter, then, that plain, dry, and harsh-looking circular building, which is the Lutheran Church of St Paul; it is there the Assembly holds its sittings. The interior arrangement has been fashioned entirely upon the plan of the French Chambers. The President’s tribune, the lower tribune of the orator before it, the gradually rising and diverging amphitheatre of seats for the members, are all entirely French in their plan. Completely French also, and with similar designation, is the political shading of the members according to their seats; the _Droit_, the _Centre_ in its variety of progressing _nuances_, and the _Gauche_ and _Extreme Gauche_ have the same signification in the German Assembly as in the French. Nor does the resemblance cease here; the constitution of the Assembly, in its various elements, has a strong affinity to that of the present French National Assembly. The majority of the members are evidently concentrated in the different shades of the _Centre_. The old conservatives of the right have but little influence, except as a make-weight against the ultra-liberals. The centre consists chiefly of the old liberals, and opposition leaders in the different chambers of such of the German states as possessed constitutions of one modification or another—men who have now, in turn, in their position towards the ultra-revolutionary spirits, that tendency which may be called liberal conservative: they are the men of progress, who, in the present hurricane of revolutionary ideas, endeavour to guide the helm so as to avoid the very rocks they have had so great a hand in raising, and to restrain the very waves which their own breath has so greatly contributed to lash into fury! They are the Odillon Barrots, and suchlike old liberals of Germany. They find that the task before them is one of far ruder difficulty than in their theoretical fancies they had first imagined; and many of them there may be, who cannot but acknowledge to themselves, however little they may be inclined to acknowledge it to the world, that the business of a vast nation is not to be conducted by inexperienced heads, however talented, however well they may have conducted the business of a counting-house, or taught theories from a professor’s chair—in fact, that theory and practice will not walk hand in hand without a long process of amalgamating experience. The left is occupied by the men of revolutionary utopics and crude subversive opinions; and in its extreme by the ardent republicans and tribunes of the people, whom the revolution has caused to spring out of the political soil like mushrooms. These are the men who complain, in speech or in journal, that the Assembly is wasting its time in vain vapid disputations—an accusation, by the way, by no means unfounded—and yet themselves, when ever they mount into the tribune, indulge, more than any others, in declamatory would-be poetical phrases, “full of