THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the sternest spokesman of absolutism and the most ardent foe of the revolution. And then German unity, with a national parliament, was won, not through a revolutionary uprising, but through monarchical action and foreign wars.
Thus, if not all, yet a great and important part of the objects struggled for by the German revolutionists of 1848 was after all accomplished—much later, indeed, and less peaceably and less completely than they had wished, and through the instrumentality of persons and forces originally hostile to them, but producing new conditions which promise to develop for the united Germany political forms and institutions of government much nearer to the ideals of 1848 than those now existing. And many thoughtful men now frequently ask the question—and a very pertinent question it is—whether all these things would have been possible had not the great national awakening of the year 1848 prepared the way for them.
But in the summer of 1852 the future lay before us in a gloomy cloud. In France, Louis Napoleon seemed firmly seated on the neck of his submissive people. The British government under Lord Palmerston had shaken hands with him. All over the European Continent the reaction from the liberal movements of the past four years celebrated triumphant orgies. How long it would prove irresistible nobody could tell. That some of its very champions would themselves become the leaders of the national spirit in Germany even the most sanguine would in 1851 not have ventured to anticipate.
My young wife and myself sailed from Portsmouth in August, 1852, and landed in the harbor of New York on a bright September morning. With the buoyant hopefulness of young hearts, we saluted the new world.
END OF VOLUME I
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