Although the Prussians, fired by patriotism, had rallied round their king and unanimously supported him in the effort to deliver the country from French domination, they had not been left untouched by the lessons of the French Revolution. To the Prussian patriots individual freedom was as precious as national independence. So strong was this feeling that Frederick William III. had been obliged to promise that at the end of the struggle he would reward his subjects’ sacrifices by granting to them a representative form of government. But few monarchs have ever parted with power except under compulsion. When the War of Liberation was over, and the country’s independence assured, the king forgot his promises. Hence there arose between the prince and his people a bitter conflict, which continued under his successor. Frederick William IV. as Crown Prince had evinced a lively sympathy with the popular demand for a Constitution; but with the sceptre he inherited the absolutist principles of his ancestors, and strove to prop up the authority of the throne by the help of religion. The German Liberals, however, had outgrown the mediaeval notion that kings rule by the grace of God. They claimed that the will of the people should be the supreme law of the State, and laughed at the Sovereign’s antiquated pretensions. The fate of the German Jews was naturally bound up in that of German Liberalism. The year 1846 was chiefly distinguished by the agitation which prevailed in Prussia and all Northern Germany in favour of religious toleration and liberty of conscience; and the emancipation of the Jews was one of the demands submitted to the King of Prussia by the Prussian Estates, especially those of Cologne, Posen and Berlin, for various measures of domestic and social improvement, as, for example, the reform of criminal justice, the publication of the procedure of trials and of the debates of the Estates, and the extension of the representation of towns and rural communities. ♦1847♦ In the following year the question of Jewish emancipation was again introduced into the Prussian Chambers and found only two opponents, one of them being Bismarck, who then declared that he was “no enemy of the Jews, and if they are my enemies,” he said, “I forgive them. Under some circumstances I even like them. I willingly accord them every right, only not that of an important official power in a Christian State. For me the words, ‘By the grace of God,’ are no mere empty sounds, and I call that a Christian State which makes the end and aim of its teaching the truths of Christianity. If I should see a Jew a representative of the King’s most sacred Majesty, I should feel deeply humiliated.”