Neither on this occasion, nor on any other, could I obtain a satisfactory reply to the above question. In fact, from the very beginning, the conduct of the men who have put themselves at the head of the present movement, has been checkered by contradictions of the most glaring and obvious kind. On the fifth of May, the present vice-president, Von Soiron, put forth an address to the inhabitants of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, calling upon them to co-operate and join with the German confederacy, and to send representatives to the union. Two of these states are comprised in the Austrian, and one in the Prussian dominions; _but none of them are German_. If nationality is to be recognised as the ruling principle--and the scheme of German confederation and empire contemplated nothing else--these countries would fall to be excluded, since, by language and race, they form part of a totally different branch of the European family. But before the ink on their proclamation of strict unity and independence was dry,--that proclamation containing the following remarkable words, "The Germans shall not be induced, on any consideration, to abridge or deprive other nations of that freedom and independence which they claim for themselves as their own unalienable right,"--we find the Germans calmly annexing Polish Posen to their league, proposing to include Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the limits of the empire, and by their official congratulatory address to Radetsky, giving national countenance to the war of subjugation in Lombardy. Even were their case otherwise good, such acts as these form an irresistible argument against their present claim for Schleswig; for upon no principle whatever are they entitled to add, on one side, to the possessions of the empire by foreign annexation, and on the other to repudiate annexation, when in favour of a foreign power.