of Europe, was remarkable for being held, as of old, under arms; and its orators, if not applauded, like Ariovist or Hermann, by the clangor of spears and shields, were, at least, saluted with trumpets and volleys of musketry. In Stuttgart, the working classes cried out for a republic. In Freiburg, in Breisgau, in a popular assembly of eight thousand persons, a large majority were in favor of it. A considerable number of republicans came together in the Exchange of Hamburg, and issued a manifesto, proposing the formation of a democratic republic, on the model of the United States of America. A proposal, also, was extensively circulated for founding three confederated republics, on the upper, the middle, and the lower Rhine. This was the extent of the republican movement in Germany. The loyalty and the good sense of this people made them satisfied with the reform of their monarchical system of government. This is now being carried through in a very thorough manner, by the establishment of truly liberal constitutions in every part of the country; and even in that kingdom whose chief so lately declared that "a piece of paper" should never stand between him and his people. The news of the fall of the French throne produced an instantaneous effect in Prussia. Petitions at once poured in to the King, from the principal towns of the kingdom, calling for the establishment of popular institutions. Business was very generally suspended, and a heavy fall in the funds showed a deep distrust of the government financiers. At first, severe measures were adopted to repress the popular excitement, such as the prohibiting of all assemblages of the people for the purpose of petitioning the King; the forbidding of persons to converse in the reading-rooms of Berlin respecting the news from France; the requiring the schoolmasters not to speak to their pupils on the recent events of that country; and the ordering a large body of troops to the Rhine. But it was impossible for the government to repress the manifestations of popular enthusiasm in the cause of liberty. By the 13th of March, the excitement had risen to so high a pitch that, in contempt of the royal prohibitions, meetings of the citizens of Berlin were held in the Park, to petition the King for the reforms demanded by the other cities. But the people were dispersed by the military, without any other injury than some accidental wounds, and order was completely restored by midnight. On the next day, however, the same scenes were acted over again, with the loss of one citizen killed. The Mayor and the Senate issued a proclamation, expressing their confidence in "the good intentions" of the King, and exhorted the citizens to maintain order; while a deputation of the magistrates and deputies of the city waited on his Majesty with a petition which had been framed by the town council. The 15th did not pass, however, without some serious encounters between the troops and the people, ten of the latter being killed, and one hundred wounded, and some considerable injury being inflicted upon the soldiers, by the throwing of stones and other missiles. The 16th brought a petition of the students of Berlin and Halle 1800 strong, as well as the arrival of deputations from the Universities of Breslau, Halle, and Leipsic, and one from the city of Cologne. The government wished to raise a force of 8000 constables, but the citizens were unwilling to serve. A burgher guard, however, which had been organized, attempted to keep order, but the populace took away their colors. The latter, also, assembled in such numbers in the neighborhood of the palace, that orders were given to the military to disperse them. The summons to retire not being obeyed, an attack was made with drawn bayonets; but the populace, retreating to the narrow streets, erected barricades, and gained some advantages over their opponents. A deputation of two hundred students applied in vain to the Crown Prince to put a stop to the effusion of blood, which continued also through the next day, when the King, still unwilling to make concessions, retired to Potsdam. But on the 18th, he returned, and yielded to the demands of the deputations and the people; promised to convoke the Prussian Diet on the 2d of April, instead of the 27th, the regular day; granted the freedom of the press; and proposed a new union of Germany, with constitutional institutions. These concessions of Frederic William were received with universal acclamation; but, unfortunately, when a crowd had as- | the people, except the pillaging the shop of sembled in the great square of the palace a glove-maker, who had delivered up some to express their gratitude by a sebehoch, Polish students to the military, and the or hurrah, the presence of the military, house of the minister of finances ad interim. then become specially obnoxious to the "Respect the property of the citizens," people by the events of the few days pre- was written on shops and houses; and the ceding, led some individuals to cry out, palace of the unpopular Crown Prince was “Soldiers, stand back." The threats and saved from destruction only by the superscoffs thereupon uttered by a considerable scription made on it of "National Propnumber of persons so exasperated the com- erty." mander of a company of dragoons, that he ordered a charge upon the crowd. Then began the fight in good earnest. The people ran furiously through the streets, crying, “To arms!" At first destitute of weapons, they soon procured them from the armorers' shops and guardhouses, and by disarming scattered bands of soldiers. The princes rode through a part of the town, exhorting the people to restore order; but the Crown Prince was seized by the populace, and subjected to the greatest indignities. Meanwhile, barricades were erected with the greatest zeal in the principal streets, and especially in the magnificent avenue of Unter den Linden. Here there were several, and one of immense proportions. At nightfall, the rising moon beheld the people, armed with such weapons as they had been able to procure, prepared behind their hastilyraised defences to dispute the progress of the troops. Of these, about 20,000 were under arms during the night. The people fought desperately. Driven from one barricade, they took refuge behind another, and even disputed the advance of the enemy from house to house. The tocsin sounded throughout the night. The earth shook with the roar of the artillery. The light of several public buildings in flames glared upon the city. Multitudes of men and women covered the roofs, or filled the windows of the houses, whence they threw down upon the troops stones, tiles, red-hot irons, boiling water, vitriol, and other missiles. One of the barricades was attacked no less than five times with grape and shot, and was not carried until after three hours' fighting. Behind the others, a considerable number of officers were picked off by practised riflemen, one of whom, stationed at the town hall, is said to have killed or wounded no less than seventeen of the enemy. No excesses during the pear to have been committed by The morning rays shone upon many fallen, but they illumined the face of a people victorious. Von Möllendorf, the commanding General, had been captured by the principal leader of the populace, a veterinary surgeon, by the name of Hogan, and had been forced to sign an order to stop the firing of the troops. A deputation preceded by a white flag, bore this order to the King, who was induced to send the military out of the city, and thereby saved his crown. The fighting over, the citizens who had fallen were placed in wagons, and carried to the court-yard of the royal palace, accompanied by a countless multitude, with heads uncovered. On the arrival of the procession, a call was raised for the King, who was obliged to descend, and look on the face of the dead. "Off with your cap," thundered the people. The King obeyed. "This is your work," exclaimed one to the monarch. "Yesterday these hearts all beat for you," cried another. At length the Queen, also, was called for; and the King, having in vain attempted to excuse her attendance on account of less, was compelled to lead her down into what was then converted into the court-yard f the dead. The royal pair stood in solemn silence for a few moments in the presence of the fallen. On their departure, the multitude sang together the sacred song. "Jesus mein Zuversicht," and retired. In the evening, the whole city blazed with thousands of torches, in honor of the victory of the people; and the prison doors having been thrown open, the released Poles were borne in triumph through the streets of the liberated and rejoicing city. The funeral of the victims of the revo lution, which took place on the 24th, was one of the most sad, but imposing spects cles ever beheld in the Prussian capital One hundred and eighty-seven corpses were exposed in state on a platform erected before the Neue Kirche, or New Church. The edifice was dressed with evergreens, and long sheets of flowing crape, which fell, waving in a gentle breeze of spring, from the top of its pillars to the earth. The procession moved in early morning. It was led by a company of marksmen, who were followed by the students of the University, headed by Baron Humboldt and the rector. After these came a number of choirs, which sang, at intervals, funeral chants and hymns; then deputations from the burgher guard, marching to the sound of the dead march, beat with muffled drums. Cars, hung with garlands and wreaths of flowers, bore the dead. The clergy of all creeds, the families of the fallen, the military officers present in Berlin, in a long train, succeeded. Behind these vocal choirs followed with sacred songs; the various guilds with their different badges veiled in crape; companies of working-men of all kinds, bearing mourning banners; and a division of the city guard, with their imperial cockades likewise in black, closed the procession. Nearly three hours were occupied by it in passing the palace. On the balcony, one end of which displayed a black flag, and the other, the national colors in crape, stood throughout the ceremony the King, together with several of the princes and ministers of state. The streets through which the procession passed, were lined with the inhabitants, a large number of them in the habiliments of deep mourning. One capacious grave, dug in the form of a cross, in the burial ground of the Invalids, received the remains of the victims-Protestants, Catholics, Jews, being all laid in different parts of one common sepulchre. The bodies being returned to the earth which gave them, the band of the opera played a dirge; addresses were made by chaplains of different forms of faith; the choirs, accompanied by the congregated multitude, chanted a burial hymn; sprigs of holly, and green wreaths and flowers, were cast upon the coffins; volleys were fired by the burgher guard over the graves of their comrades, and all eyes were filled with tears. The official return of the troops killed in the city was three officers, and seven Bon-commissioned officers and privates; of the wounded, twenty-eight officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, and two hundred and twenty-five privates. Meanwhile, the King, after the triumph of the people, had readily yielded to all their demands. He issued a proclamation supplicating his "dear Berliners" to hold fast their loyalty; he harangued them from the balcony of the palace in behalf of order; he changed his ministry; intrusted the capital to the care of the burgher guard; and, promising to forgive and forget the past, he rode through the streets, with the new German colors on his arm, and declared to his subjects, that he would place himself at the head of the movement in favor of national freedom and unity. This announcement, afterwards made officially, was received with universal favor. The cry of "Long live the Emperor of Germany," is said to have called out a gracious refusal of this title; but the sight of the national tri-color, adopted by the King, filled all eyes with joy, and all mouths with "Long live Frederic William." Some attempts have been made, since the revolution, by the working men, to proceed to the same excess of change, which was partially effected by the same class at Paris. But the citizens have been prompt to interfere to prevent their success; and little has occurred to disturb the peaceful course of reform, which the new Constituent Assembly is still engaged in carrying forward. The frequent charivari serenades, held before the houses of unpopular magistrates and officers, have given rise to some slight collisions between the people and the authoriries. The project of a Constitution, proposed by the King, was burned by the citizens before the palace of the Prince Royal. The bourgeoisie, offended by some measures of the government, forcibly demanded and obtained the guard of the military posts of the capital. The Assembly having refused to acknowledge that the combatants of the 18th of March had deserved well of their country, disturbances broke out in Berlin which resulted in the pillaging of the arsenal by the populace. Herr Camphausen entirely lost the confidence of the fickle public, and never having possessed that of the King, was obliged to retire with disgrace from office, together with all the ministers appointed at the commencement of the revolution, and has been succeeded by the still more liberal ministry of Herr Hausemann. The Assembly, which has taken the place of the former Diet, is conservative in character, but its measures have been popular, and among them is a law for the abolition of fiefs. The Prince of Prussia, recalled from England, whither he had been compelled to retire in consequence of his unpopular principles and conduct, was allowed to take his seat in the legislative body without opposition from any quarter. The unhappy difficulties which sprang up in the grand duchy of Posen between the German inhabitants and the Polish, were easily suppressed by the government; and the war with Denmark, waged to secure to the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein an independent place in the new German nation, has tended to promote the internal political tranquillity of Prussia, however much it may have jeopardized its relations with Russia and the North. | fourteen emperors to Germany, and six kings to Spain-has been subverted by a single day's work of the students and burghers of the capital; a fact, by the way, which would seem to prove to the satisfaction of those who have most enjoyed their laugh at the pipe-tails and small-beer potations, the caps and canes, the beards and jack-boots, the spurs, schnaps, and surtouts of these Teutonic Burschen, that after all these singularities have been duly laughed down, there yet remains an aliquid humanum about them left, not so easily to be sneered away. "After me, the deluge," said Metternich prophetically; but he little imagined that the waters would rise so suddenly, or renovate so extensively the face of society. His timid, time-serving policy had lasted forty years; yet after a struggle of half as many hours, not a fragment of it was left behind. It had consisted in quietly, cantiously holding on to the past, without change or turning. But when the steamStill, though Berlin has not, like Paris, boat had been launched on the Adriatic, had its 15th of May, it must be observed and committed to the current of the Danthat there has prevailed in that capital the ube, when the steam car had startled the constant fear of it. Indeed, so new and silence of the Bohemian and the Carinthistrange has the position seemed to Prus- an valleys; when, in the north, Frederic sians to find themselves without a govern- William had given a constitution to the ment overseeing all things and ordering all Prussians; when, in the things, without a sovereign who was the IX. had commenced the work of reform State, the only source of power, of law, and even in the Vatican; and when, in the of security, that a nervous dread of anarchy, west, the Swiss republic had been revolu aggravated by the apprehension of foreign tionized, and the French monarchy overinvasion, has prevailed not only in the cap- thrown-the past had passed away; the ital but very widely through the kingdom. old ideas were gone; manners, pursuits, In many districts this political excitement interests, were changed. And what was has been so intense as to create a hypo- clear even to the veteran minister himself. chondria nervosa,* attended with numerous the money, almost the credit of the impewell marked and disagreeable symptoms.trial government, was gone; and like Louis If the events which have taken place at Berlin, in consequence of the French revolution, might, in any measure, have been anticipated by observers of the times, those which have occurred in Vienna have certainly taken all men by surprise. The Austrian monarchy, which ruled over Germans, Slavonians, Wallachians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Croatians, Italians, and still other tribes--which has given XVI. of France, he had lived to see himself compelled to call together his States General, in order to ward off the imminent bankruptcy of the country. Austria was not unprepared for the extinction of its ancient policy; and many significant signs of change had shoes themselves before the final crisis. For several years a revolutionary society had existed in the capital, small at first, bat. on the outbreak in Cracow, numbering s thousand members. By their efforts, a petition numerously signed was sent in to the government, two years ago, praying for a diminution of the strictness of the censorship of the press. Even a few days before the reception of the news of the Parisian revolution, nearly all the professors of the University, though at the risk of their places, had agreed to petition the Emperor for the total abolition of the censorship; a number of the Austrian and Bohemian deputies had resolved, at all hazards, to demand free constitutions for their respective countries; Italy was in open revolt; and very serious manifestations of popular disaffection had been made in several of the provinces. When, therefore, the fall of Louis Philippe was made known at Vienna, on the last day of February, men's minds seemed suddenly made up for commotion. The public securities fell; a run was commenced on the banks of government, and of deposit; and thirty thousand troops were ordered to Italy. The professors and students presented, forthwith, their petition; and the rejection of it at the different bureaux of the government, brought matters to a crisis on the 13th of March. On that day, the professors announced to the students that they had been directed by the government to enjoin on them the maintenance of good order. But, at the same time, by way of commentary on the order, they invited their hearers to go with them, to present their rejected petition, to the Lower Austrian Chamber of Deputies, then in session. The invitation was not declined. All rushed into the street; and after their minds had been still more inflamed by a Latin harangue from an eminent jurist, they proceeded towards the Chamber, in the Herren street. As the procession, preceded by the insignia of the University, advanced on its way, it was joined by several hundred members of the Polytechnic schools, together with a considerable number of citizens; and was greeted, wherever it passed, by looks, if not words of encouragement from the men in the streets, and the ladies at the windows. On the arrival of the procession at the Chamber, the marshal of the Diet appeared on the balcony, and inquired the cause of the assemblage. Thereupon, four professors from each faculty stepped forward, and presented their petition. Having laid this before the Diet, the marshal returned with the reply, that it had been favorably received. But when | considerable commotion had arisen, and a number of the students and citizens had made their way into the hall of the assembly, the marshal was directed to proceed to the Emperor, and lay before him a petition of the Diet which had been before agreed upon. The people followed him. On reaching the palace, the number of the crowd had become swelled to between 50,000 and 100,000. The assemblage, harangued at intervals by the students, waited impatiently for the reply of the Emperor from mid-day until four o'clock in the afternoon. At that time, the soldiers made their appearance, in order to compel the people to disperse. Straightway, the word of command was given to a battalion of grenadiers to fire. They did so. And this made heroes of the people. They rushed instantaneously upon the soldiers, without giving them time to reload; and a voice suddenly calling out, " Bayonets off," the order was obeyed, as if mechanically. Then arose the cry, "To the arsenal." An aged man, waving his white kerchief, dipped in blood, shouted, with tears in his eyes, "This is the flag of our liberties;" and the throng pressed on to the arsenal and the public offices. Throughout the city, the alarm-bells tolled to arms. The cannon roared through the streets. Stones and bricks were hurled against the soldiers, and furniture was thrown down upon them from the windows. Though the military had taken possession of the gates, one entrance was, at length, discovered unguarded; and thereupon a tide of invasion poured into the city, which at once overwhelmed all resistance. The Emperor yielded; Metternich resigned; the troops received orders to retire; the people were triumphant; the city was illuminated. This overthrow of absolute power was not effected without the commission of some excesses by the lower classes. There was some plundering in the city during the contest; urged on by the academicians, the populace burned the villa of Prince Metternich, on the Reunwege, and subsequently hung his Highness in effigy, in front of his former residence. In the country, several factories were destroyed by fire; some convents were pillaged; and the peasantry of Gallicia took their revenge for previous wrongs on the subordi nate magistrates and office-holders. |