event since the birth of Christ. Many a Sultan in the Empire, he hoped, would tremble and many an oligarchy would learn that there were limits to human endurance. Klopstock, the Nestor of German literature, regretted that he had not a hundred voices to celebrate the birth of liberty. It is glorious, cried Georg Forster, to see what philosophy has ripened in the brain and realised in the State. The philosophic Herder proclaimed the Revolution the most important movement in the life of mankind since the Reformation, and welcomed it as a no less decisive step towards human freedom.

'The spirit of the time is strong within me,' exclaimed Gentz, the most brilliant of Prussian publicists. 'I am young, and the universal striving for freedom arouses my warmest sympathy. I should regard the shipwreck of this movement as one of the greatest disasters that ever befell mankind. It would be felt that men were happy only as slaves, and every tyrant, great and small, would revenge himself for the fright the French nation had given him.'

'You cannot be more convinced than I,' wrote Wieland in an Open Letter to the French reformers, 'that your nation was wrong to bear such misgovernment so long; that every people has an indefeasible right to as much liberty as can coexist with order; that the person and property of every citizen must be secured against the caprices of power, and that each must be taxed in proportion to his wealth.'

In the crowded salons of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin the intellectual elite of the Prussian capital applauded the moving drama on the Seine. Cosmopolitan Hamburg and tolerant Brunswick welcomed the dawning age of reason with enthusiasm; and in distant Königsberg the greatest of German thinkers made no secret of his joy. Opinion was more critical in Hanover, where Brandes and Rehberg asserted the superior virtues of the British Constitution and exalted Burke above Rousseau; while, in Weimar, Goethe and Schiller, though in no way blind to the sins of the ancien régime, lamented that the work of reform had fallen into the hands of the multitude and that the frail bark of culture was in danger of shipwreck in the revolutionary rapids. A more balanced view was advanced by Humboldt, who, while foretelling a short life for the new Constitution,

maintained that the benefits of the great upheaval woul be felt beyond the frontiers of France rather than in th land of its birth. Many of the most vociferous of it admirers, led by Klopstock and Gentz, changed their not when the reform movement degenerated into murde and anarchy; but others, like Kant and Herder, refuse to allow even the Terror to blind them to the endurin value of its work for humanity.

The favourable impression made by French ideas' a the outset was enhanced by the appearance of the firs batches of refugees on the Rhine. One must distinguis] between the voluntary and compulsory emigrations wrote Madame de Stael. After the fall of the monarchy we all emigrated.' This distinction between 'the emigra tion of pride' and 'the emigration of necessity' wa: fully appreciated in the frontier lands in which the newcomers sought temporary shelter from the storm Though they were kindly welcomed by the ecclesiastica Electors and provided with every luxury, the citizens of Coblenz and Mainz watched their arrogance, their extravagance, and their immoralities with indignation Each haughty aristocrat seemed a fresh argument for the necessity and the utility of the Revolution; and even those who cared nothing for the Rights of Man sympathised with a nation which had been subject to such unworthy masters. A brief experience of their character and methods aroused no less anger and contempt in the breasts of the Emperor Leopold and Kaunitz than among the easy-going bourgeois of the Rhineland. The indignation they provoked was intensified by the cruel and disparaging tone in which many of their leaders referred to the sovereigns whom they had deserted; and the result of their intransigeance was clearly foretold by Mirabeau. By threatening us with the return of despotism,' he cried bitterly in 1790, they will drag us willy-nilly to a republic.'

In his dispassionate work on the causes of the war of 1792, Ranke argued that a conflict between the new France and the old Europe was virtually inevitable; to which Sybel replied that its outbreak was solely due to the chauvinism of Brissot and his fellow Girondins, who believed that war would strengthen the position of their party. If the former explanation was too vague, the

latter was too narrow. The antagonism between the doctrinaire radicalism of the French reformers and the unimaginative traditionalism of the Great Powers rendered a conflict probable enough; but hostilities need not have broken out but for the two concrete problems of the abolition of feudal rights in Alsace and the gathering of armed émigrés in the cities of the Rhineland. In the first case the German princes had a legitimate grievance, in the second the French Government; and there were plenty of men in Paris, Berlin and Vienna who were eager to fan the smouldering embers into a flame. The first shot was fired by France; and after a decade of desperate struggle, the victorious Republic pushed its frontier to the Rhine and established itself as the first military Power in Europe. I observe that

minds are fermenting in that Germany of yours,' wrote Mirabeau to Mauvillon at the end of 1789.

'If the spark falls on combustible material, it will be a fire of charcoal not of straw. Though perhaps more advanced in education, you are not so mature as we, because your emotions are rooted in the head; and since your brains are petrified with slavery, the explosion will come with you much later than with us.'

Mirabeau's prophecy proved correct; for the main effects of the Revolution in Germany were manifested some years after the acute crisis in France was past.

The combined influence of the ideas of 1789 and of the Great War which followed their proclamation produced concrete results in Germany of incalculable importance-one of a negative, others of a positive character. The first was the destruction of the political framework of the country. The proved weakness of the Empire in the war, the desertion of Prussia and the North at the height of the struggle, and the collapse of the ecclesiastical Electorates, left no attentive observer in doubt that the old firm was in liquidation. No ambitious and aggressive State could have wished for a neighbour less fitted by its traditions and institutions to parry the thrust of its conquering sword. Well might Napoleon write to the Directory from Rastadt, 'If the Germanic Body did not exist, we should have to create it expressly for

our own convenience.' When the left bank of the Rh was annexed to the French Republic, Görres wrote celebrated obituary.

'On Dec. 30, 1797, at three in the afternoon, the Holy Ron Empire, supported by the Sacraments, passed away peacefu at Regensburg at the age of 955, in consequence of se debility and an apoplectic stroke. The deceased was born Verdun in the year 842, and educated at the court of Cha the Simple and his successors. The young prince was tau piety by the Popes, who canonised him in his lifetime. his tendency to a sedentary life, combined with zeal religion, undermined his health. His head became visil weaker, till at last he went mad in the Crusades. Freque bleedings and careful diet restored him; but, reduced to shadow, the invalid tottered through the centuries till viole hemorrhage occurred in the Thirty Years' War. Hardly b he recovered when the French arrived and a stroke put end to his sufferings. He kept himself unstained by t Aufklärung, and bequeathed the left bank of the Rhine the French Republic."

Görres was right. The Empire was not buried till 180 but it was slain by the Revolution. It perished unwe unhonoured and unsung; and its ghost had to be la before Germany could be reborn.

Secularisation was in the air before 1789; and, wh the Republican armies reached the Rhine, the princ whose interests were affected sought compensation f their losses on the right bank. When rude hands we laid on the ark of the covenant they quickly four imitators. By the Recess of 1803 the ecclesiastic electorates and principalities were swept away; th Free Cities, with the exception of Hamburg, Breme Lübeck, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, and Augsburg, disappeare and the old organisation of the Circles was broke in pieces. In the College of Princes the Protestant obtained a majority; and power passed from south t north, from the Austrian to the Prussian camp. Th Hapsburg ascendancy was overthrown by the evictio of the ecclesiastics and by the aggrandisement of Bavaria Baden, Württemberg, and Hesse.

'Few among the great transformations of modern history declares Treitschke, 'seem so detestable, so base and so mea

as this Princes' Revolution. Not a glimmer of a bold idea, not a spark of noble passion illuminated the colossal breach of public law. And yet the overthrow was a great necessity. All that was buried was already dead. The ancient forms of the State vanished in an instant, as if they had been swallowed up in the earth.'

The Princes' Revolution left the historic structure little more than a ruin; and it was clear that its respite would be brief. A year later, when the First Consul crowned himself in Notre Dame, the Hapsburg monarch assumed the title of Emperor of Austria. In 1805 the cannon of Austerlitz battered down what remained of the crumbling walls and towers of the Holy Roman Empire. In the following summer the curtain was rung down on a thousand years of German history. The Holy Roman Empire, with the Emperor, the Electors, the Diet, the Court of Appeal, the Ecclesiastical Princes, the Imperial Knights and Free Cities, collapsed like a house of cards at the touch of Napoleon's spear. When the German Bund emerged from the Congress of Vienna, there were only forty-one States in place of the motley multitude which had composed the historic Empire. The outward transformation of Germany was as wholesale and almost as rapid as that of France; and it was accomplished without the savagery and sufferings which disgraced the noble experiment of 1789. On the other hand, the simplification of political geography brought gain rather to the princes than to the nation; for Germany as a whole secured neither unity, liberty nor strength.

The second momentous result of the Revolution was the renaissance of Prussia; but it was not till the débâcle of 1806 that her slow-witted ruler began to realise that he must take a lesson from his terrible neighbour. 'The Prussian Monarchy,' declared Mirabeau, 'is so constituted that it could not cope with any calamity'; and the calamity had now arrived. The work of Stein and Hardenberg was rendered possible as well as urgent by Napoleon's thunderbolts; but the ideas to which they gave practical shape were in large measure those of 1789. The counsellors of Frederick William II and his successor were men like Mencken, Lombard and Beyme, who academically desired the application of French Vol. 231.-No. 458.

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