They are usually spoken of as free-thinkers and frequently as anti-religious in temper and conviction. The charge of irreligion seems based upon the misconception or the misrepresentation of their orthodox critics. It is, at any rate, undeserved, as far as Gutzkow, the leader of the school, is concerned. It is true that they were liberal in the matter of religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which to combat the rising tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and functions. This was especially true after the accession to the throne of Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William IV., in 1840. Critics have ascribed the negative, disintegrating, and cosmopolitan spirit of the group as a whole to the fact that Börne and Heine were Jews. In addition, however, to the abundant non-racial grounds for this spirit, already urged as inherent in the historic crisis under discussion, we should recall the fact that Heine, as a literary producer, is more closely allied with the Romanticists than with Young Germany, and that Börne, who in his celebrated _Letters from Paris_ (1830-34) and elsewhere went farther than all other members of the school in transforming art criticism into political criticism, was no cosmopolitan but an ardent, sincere, and consistent German patriot. Moreover, while Börne and Heine belong through sympathy and deliberate choice to Young Germany, the real spokesmen of the group, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Gutzkow, were non-Jewish Germans.