Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/51

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NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE
19

Habsburgs." The Carlsbad resolutions[1] followed the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, and after the pressure from without had been removed and all the demons of reaction had been let loose again on the people, one of the most important measures of the Metternich[2] system of perjured and accursed memory, was the destruction of the democratic army of the Wars of Liberation. The highly civilized regions of Germany might have been ripe for that army, but it collapsed abruptly, together with nearly all the fine things the great popular rising had brought, under the leaden weight of the junker barbarism, having its seat east of the Elbe.

A superficial glance at the development of


  1. Resolutions adopted at a conference of German princes and their representatives at Carlsbad, in 1819. These resolutions concerned stringent police measures against the so-called demagogues, especially professors and students who had the temerity to remind the German princes of their promises to grant constitutions to their peoples, promises made when the princes were in great trouble. Those police persecutions lasted for a whole generation and found innumerable victims among the democratic elements of Germany. The period is generally described as the demagogue chase.—Translator.
  2. Metternich, the Austrian statesman, was the head of German and European reaction. This evil genius of Germany