THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
German empire, to introduce it practically, and thereby to satisfy the great national want of the German people.
It was still engaged in learned and arduous debates about the fundamental right, and liberties the German citizens should possess; it still had to solve doubts as to whether Germany should have a Reichstag to be elected by all the people and whether the head of the national government should be a hereditary or only an elective Kaiser, or a President, or instead of a single head, an executive committee. It had still to determine of what countries and parts of countries the German empire should consist; whether the German-Austrian districts should form a part of it, and which of the two German great powers, Austria or Prussia, should in this event have the hegemony. The parliamentary struggle on these questions lasted long, and only, when the reactionary Austrian minister, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, demanded that the whole of Austria, organized as a united state with its nearly thirty millions of non-German inhabitants, should form part of the German empire—a demand with which the creation of a really German national union seemed entirely incompatible—only then did the parliament come to a decision. The majority declared itself for a hereditary Kaiser, and on March 28, 1849, elected to that office the King of Prussia.
However unpopular Prussia and the Prussian king were outside the boundaries of that kingdom, especially in South Germany, and however little the democratic party desired the creation of an executive head to the German empire in the shape of a hereditary Kaiser, yet when the work of German unity appeared at last completed, the national enthusiasm was once more kindled into a joyous flame. A committee consisting of thirty-three members of the national parliament, headed by its president, betook itself to Berlin,
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