But these changes were yet by no means equivalent to the introduction of republican elements in the Government. An approach was made toward the granting of equality of rights; but this was only _granted_; the Government was still absolute; strictly speaking, it had the right, so far as formal obligations were concerned, to remove the very privileges which it had given. But the _promise_ of something more was given also. Besides the already-mentioned renewal of that promise, the king, June 3, 1814, in an order issued while he was in Paris, intimated his intention to come to a final conclusion respecting the particular form of the constitution after his return to Berlin. In May, 1815, he issued another edict, the substance of which was that provision should be made for a parliamentary representation of the people; that, to this end, the so-called estates of the provinces should be reorganized, and from them representatives should be chosen, who should have the right to deliberate respecting all subjects of legislation which concern the persons and property of citizens; and that a commission should be at once appointed, to meet in Berlin on the first of September, whose business should be to frame a constitution. But this commission was not then appointed, and of course did not meet on the first of September. Two years later the commissioners were named; but their work has never been heard of. Here is to be discerned a manifest wavering in the mind of the king respecting the fulfilment of his intentions. The German States, taught by the bitter experience of the late war the disadvantages of their dismembered condition, and bound together more closely than ever before by the recollection of their common sufferings and common triumphs, saw the necessity of a real union, to take the place of the merely nominal one which had thus far existed in the shadowy hegemony of the house of Hapsburg. The German Confederation, essentially as it still exists, was organized at Vienna by the rulers of the several German States and representatives from the free cities, June 8, 1815. Although there was in this assembly no direct representation of the people, it is clear that its deliberations were in great part determined by the unmistakable utterances of the popular mind. For one of the first measures adopted was to provide that in all the States of the Confederacy constitutional governments should be guaranteed. Frederick William himself was one of the most urgent supporters of this provision. It is therefore not calculated to elevate our estimation of the openness, honesty, and simplicity for which this king is praised, and to which his general course seems to entitle him, that as late as March, 1818, in reply to a petition from the city of Coblenz, that he would grant the promised constitution, he remarked that 'neither the order of May 22, 1815, nor article xiii. of the acts of the Confederacy had fixed the _time_ of the