Rarely, indeed, does a German caricaturist presume to meddle with politics, and still more rarely does he do it with impunity. The Germans, with all their excellences, seem wanting in the spirit that has given us our turbulent, ill-organized freedom. Perhaps their beer has offered too ready and cheap a resource against the chafing resentments that tyranny excites; for a narcotized brain is indolently submissive to whatever is very difficult of remedy. Coffee and tobacco keep the Turk a slave. The wisest act of Louis Napoleon's usurpation was his giving a daily ration of tobacco to every soldier. Woe to despots when men cease to dull and pollute their brains with tobacco and alcohol! There will then be a speedy end put to the system that takes five millions of the _élite_ of Europe from industry, and consigns them to the business of suppression and massacre. Whatever may be the cause, Germany has scarcely yet begun her apprenticeship to freedom; and, consequently, her public men lose the inestimable advantage of seeing their measures as the public sees them. Let us hope that the German people may be able to appropriate part of our experience, and so work their way to rational and orderly freedom without passing through the stage of ignorant suffrage and thief-politicians. Meanwhile there is no political caricature in Germany. [Illustration: A Journeyman's Leave-taking. "Hear me, all of you. You, and you, and you, and you! Good-bye, mistresses. I tell you freely to your faces, your bacon and greens are not to my taste. I am going to try my luck. I will march on."--LUDWIG RICHTER, _Leipsic_, 1848.]