¶ And what would they do with their new bauble, liberty, fraternity and equality? The centre of the stage was occupied by a struggling mass of kings, fighting not only for their crowns but for the very clothes on their backs! There were poets in fine frenzy declaiming; grenadiers firing muzzle-loaders; priests invoking the wrath of God; kings shouting out that they were the only accredited earthly representatives of Heaven; historians hotly insisting that all were in error, and that the scroll showed this or that; law-givers pleading for the old forms; lunatics laughing in demoniacal glee; peasants armed with pitchforks jabbing right and left; demagogues calling on Heaven to witness their lofty and disinterested leadership; while around the edges of the scene mountebanks, camp-followers, renegades, whores and political blacklegs, were waiting for their share of the plunder, let victory fall where it may. ¶ What a magnificent scramble for place, pelf and power! It were blasphemy to call this riot the desire for progress for the masses. It were equal blasphemy to call it stupidity and reaction, on the part of the contending monarchs, as against crushing with iron heel the hopes of the people for political and intellectual life. Either one of these diagonally opposed interpretations of the time is too extreme. The truth is in neither view. As a matter of fact, behind the seething mass of human forms was the age-old motive of human selfishness; and while here and there some lofty soul may have glimpsed in his fervid imagination a United Germany, based on a "German national faith," in which the rights of each citizen should be no more or no less than the rights of all others, with each man working for all men and all men for each man, this poetical idea was only another evidence of how the noblest minds place the illusion and the dream before the appalling fact of human selfishness in the universal struggle for personal aggrandizement. ¶ The merging of the various German states, or the transference of land from one German monarch to another, in the ensuing political struggle for power, is, after all, as nothing compared with the change in ideas, now close at hand; what may be called the "mind" of Germany was about to undergo a veritable French Revolution! However, it was not to be a French Revolution in the sense of mob-rule. We shall make this clear as we come more especially to tell you, in details, of a certain political millennium which Bismarck scorned, although courageously pressed upon him by leaders of the party of the people. ¶ On the whole, however, the drift of events was toward "German national faith," bringing in turn some form of representative government, as against the doctrine of Divine-right of kings. The monarchs were placed more and more on the defensive; it was to be their last stand, not only for their crowns but for their very lives! * * * * *