The smaller states, especially those which border on the Rhine, gradually became the acknowledged hotbeds of sedition. It was there that the expatriated journalists and crack-brained patriotic poets sought refuge, when their articles, pamphlets, and ditties, became too strong for the stomach of the legitimate censor; and there they have been for years hatching treason upon unaddled eggs. The old influence exercised by France over the Rhenish Confederation has never utterly decayed. Each fresh insurrectionary leap in Paris has been followed by a convulsive movement in the western Germanic princedoms; and no pains have been spared for the dissemination of the republican propaganda. Even this evil might have been checked, had Austria and Prussia acted in unison and good faith towards each other; but, unfortunately for Europe, the policy of the latter power has always been of the most tortuous and deceptive kind. Prussia, raised to and maintained in the first class of European states, solely on the strength of her military armament, and jealous of the superior strength of her southern rival, has for many years been engaged in intrigues with the minor states, for the purpose of securing to herself an independent position, in the event of the dissolution of the great German confederation. Unable to obtain her object through a legitimate supremacy in the Diet, Prussia has gradually withdrawn from the proceedings of the Federal Congress, and apparently surrendered to Austria the command of that feeble body. But by means of the Zollverein, or Commercial League--a scheme which she maturely prepared and perseveringly pursued--Prussia had contrived to secure the adhesion of fully three-fourths of the Germanic states--thus expecting to constitute herself a protectorate in reality, if not in name, and to set the authority of the Diet at absolute defiance. In England, where very little is known of the secret springs of continental diplomacy, the Zollverein was regarded as a mere commercial measure. It was, in reality, nothing more than a preparation for the coming crisis, in the course of which, as Prussia fondly hoped, Germany might be rent asunder, and the larger portion of the spoil accrue naturally to her share. As if to make the distinction between herself and Austria more apparent, Prussia began to affect liberalism in a remarkable degree. Her talk was of constitutions on the broadest basis; and her king was, in words at least, a Quixote in the cause of freedom. But words, however skilfully uttered, cannot, in the total absence of action, deceive a people long. The king of Prussia's promises were not a whit more fruitful than the prophecies of the free-traders, who told us of an immediate millennium. The censorship of the press was maintained as stringently as ever, and no concession was made to the popular demands, naturally stimulated to excess by this show of liberality on the part of the sovereign.