The people of Germany, and especially those who had risen against Napoleon, had expected a more complete unity on a democratic basis, and the disappointment of their hopes was one of the chief causes of the revolution which, in 1848, broke out simultaneously in nearly every one of the federal capitals. This movement took the Governments by surprise, and so overwhelming was the popular demand for unity, that they offered but little opposition to the convening of a National Assembly, which met at Frankfort-on-Main on May 18th, 1848, and appointed the Austrian Archduke Johann provisional "Administrator of the Empire." It is generally asserted that the failure of this serious attempt to weld Germany together was an inevitable consequence of the jealousy existing between Austria and Prussia, but none can say with certainty what the sequel might not have been, had not Frederick William IV., the grand-uncle of the present German Emperor, refused the imperial crown when it was offered to him by the National Assembly. It is very well conceivable that, if that monarch had been less fully persuaded of the divine rights of kings and of the incompetence of popular representatives to bestow crowns, the work which Bismarck did in the next twenty years, with so grievous an expenditure of blood and iron, might have been accomplished by peaceable means, and that the world might to-day have been confronted with the problem of a much larger, much richer, and much more united Germany. Those who would not regard German domination in Europe as an unmixed blessing have reason to be thankful for Frederick William's archaic theories on the relationships of Princes to their peoples. And those who care to amuse themselves by following up the grand alternatives of history must not forget that 1848 saw the birth of the modern German Fleet, which was the fruit of a purely popular movement. Indeed, the patriots of the Frankfort Parliament found in the "imperial fleet," which they actually founded, the necessary symbol of that national unity which was the goal of their aspirations.