Germany has the largest class of scholars; men of talent, sometimes of genius, of great working power, exceedingly well furnished for their work, with a knowledge of the past and the present. On the whole, they seem to have a greater power of thought than the scholars of any other land. They live in a country where intellectual worth is rated at its highest value. As England is the paradise of the patrician and the millionnaire, so is Germany for the man of thought; Goethe and Schiller, and the Humboldts took precedence of the mere conventional aristocracy. The empire of money is for England; that of mind is for Germany. But there the scholar is positively hindered in his function by the power of the government, which allows freedom of thought, and by education tends to promote it, yet not its correlative freedom of speech, and still less the consequent of that--freedom of act. Revelations of new thought are indeed looked for, and encouraged in certain forms, but the corresponding revolution of old things is forbidden. An idea must remain an idea; the government will not allow it to become a deed, an institution, an idea organized in men. The children of the mind must be exposed to die, or, if left alive, their feet are cramped, so that they cannot go alone; useless, joyless, and unwed, they remain in their father's house. The government seeks to establish national unity of action, by the sacrifice of individual variety of action, personal freedom; every man must be a soldier and a Christian, wearing the livery of the government on the body and in the soul, and going through the spiritual exercises of the church, as through the manual exercise of the camp. In a nation so enlightened, personal freedom cannot be wholly sacrificed, so thought is left free, but speech restricted by censorship--speech with the human mouth or the iron lips of the press. Now, as of old, is there a controversy between the temporal and the spiritual powers, about the investiture of the children of the soul.