"Fellow-citizens! However my conduct as a revolutionist may be judged, I have a clear conscience. Not a deed of injustice can be laid to my door: not a kreutzer of your money have I allowed to be squandered, not a heller has gone into my pocket! But this I must say, you will be astonished, if ever you see the accounts, to find how your money has been wasted, and how few there were who sacrificed anything to the holy cause of the people, and how many took care to be well paid out of the national coffers for every service rendered. "No sooner had the revolution broken out than hundreds of adventurers swarmed into the land, with boasts of having suffered in freedom's cause: they claimed their reward in hard cash from your coffers. There was no crossing the streets of Carlsruhe for the crowds of uniformed, sabre-carrying clerks; and whilst this herd of idlers revelled on your money, your half-famished sons were exposing their breasts to the bullets of the enemy in freedom's cause. But whoever set himself to oppose this order of things was proclaimed to be a mean and narrow-minded citizen; whoever showed a disinclination to persecute his political adversary _à la Windischgratz_, was a _réactionnaire_ or a traitor. "At the head of this party was Struve, the man whose part I took before the tribunal at Freiburg--not as a legal adviser, but as a friend; the man whose absurd plan for giving the ministers salaries of six thousand florins; of sending ambassadors to Rome and Venice, and agents to St. Petersburg and Hungary, I overruled; the man whose endeavour to give every situation to which a good salary was attached to foreign adventurers, was effectually opposed by me. This man, despised for his personal cowardice, whose dismissal from the provisional government was demanded by the entire army--this man, instead of supporting and strengthening the government as he promised, tried, because his ambitious views found no encouragement, and with the assistance of foreign adventurers, to overthrow me; and when I showed him the force that was drawn up ready to oppose him, he took refuge in base lies, and had not even sufficient courage to go home, till I, whom he had just tried to overthrow, protected him with my own body to his house. "The people had chosen between us, for at the elections he had been first thrown out, and he only obtained three thousand votes as a substitute, whilst I had been elected by seven thousand voices.