If that of which every German dreams, and so few are ready to take any practical steps to attain,--German unity,--ever comes, it must ride roughshod over the Romish clergy, for one thing. Of course there are other obstacles. So long as beer is cheap, and songs of the Fatherland are set to lilting strains, will these excellent people "Ho, ho, my brothers," and "Hi, hi, my brothers," and wait for fate, in the shape of some compelling Bismarck, to drive them into anything more than the brotherhood of brown mugs of beer and Wagner's mysterious music of the future. I am not sure, by the way, that the music of Richard Wagner is not highly typical of the present (1868) state of German unity,--an undefined longing which nobody exactly understands. There are those who think they can discern in his music the same revolutionary tendency which placed the composer on the right side of a Dresden barricade in 1848, and who go so far as to believe that the liberalism of the young King of Bavaria is not a little due to his passion for the disorganizing operas of this transcendental writer. Indeed, I am not sure that any other people than Germans would not find in the repetition of the five hours of the "Meister-Singer von Nurnberg," which was given the other night at the Hof Theater, sufficient reason for revolution. Well, what I set out to say was, that most Germans would like unity if they could be the unit. Each State would like to be the center of the consolidated system, and thus it happens that every practical step toward political unity meets a host of opponents at once. When Austria, or rather the house of Hapsburg, had a preponderance in the Diet, and it seemed, under it, possible to revive the past reality, or to realize the dream of a great German empire, it was clearly seen that Austria was a tyranny that would crush out all liberties. And now that Prussia, with its vital Protestantism and free schools, proposes to undertake the reconstruction of Germany, and make a nation where there are now only the fragmentary possibilities of a great power, why, Prussia is a military despot, whose subjects must be either soldiers or slaves, and the young emperor at Vienna is indeed another Joseph, filled with the most tender solicitude for the welfare of the chosen German people.