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classes of Germany. Many feared, more hoped, and the best part of the nation stood up to fight against absolutism and for the idea of unification.
All walks of life, all ages, were represented amongst the arms and brains struggling for what was first crushed because it was popular and national, and decades after partly permitted and partly accomplished because it was irrepressible. That period of working and fighting was a stern lesson in democracy; class differences were wiped out, old and young, learning and ignorance, professions and trades, rich and poor, hoped and suffered for the same end—stood side by side on the barricades and on the field, were imprisoned and maltreated alike—were stricken down together in battle or on the places of execution—laughed and wept together. Not universal prosperity but common distress draws men and peoples together, and teaches community of interests. That is the way nations are born of clans and mobs.
Naturally, it was the youth of the country, and principally the educated youth, with the ideals of Roman valor and of Helenic philosophy inculcated into and working in their minds, that were caught in the avalanche of the revolutionary spirit.
The universities, while furnishing their volunteers to fight on the barricades, and others to secure the Germanization of the Northern provinces, sent delegates to a Students' Congress to the Wartburg, which had long been the poetical symbol of German strength and idealism. When our delegate (I was at that time a student in the University of Greifswald) reported to us of the enthusiasm pervading this Congress of young men, and the earnestness and vigor displayed in their meetings,
