many and many a year, the battle for internal freedom, for which a few better spirits long ardently and cry manfully, from the free Alps and the free countries to which they are fled. It is this "counting the cost," which has cost so many patriots their lives, or their lives' happiness. Which sent abroad, in headlong haste, in the race for life, the Follens, the Arndts, the Forsters; and which has doomed many another noble spirit to pine out its days in distant exile, or to steal along the hidden path of poverty at home. It is this counting the cost which makes Germany what it is a dreaming, intellectual, speculative slave; which Will basely stoop to the hand of power. Stosst an! Burschen-weal! live thou, hurra, ho! Free is the Bursch! Aye, be true, ye Burschen! and what?-join with free spirits to free your country? No, of that you have no hope. The malady of political subserviency is too deeply rooted. The system of despotic interference in every man's affairs is too cunningly constructed, and too widely and powerfully extended. You have no hope of aid from your officeholding middle ranks; from your military and official nobles; from your fellows connected with government, police, and tax-gatherers, and secret judges and scribes; you have no hope in the moral vigour and honest zeal of your countrymen for political liberty,—therefore, Be true, ye Burschen, and-SING FOR AYE!!! That is all! Sing for aye, Free is the Bursch! He is the only German who has a shadow of freedom, and that only so long as he is a Bursch. He makes his examination, receives his certificate, and sinks from a free Bursch into a slave, and perhaps a tax-gatherer, the tormentor of slaves!-a miserable awaking out of the brief and lively dream of academic life, where he heard and joined in the enlivening cry over the wine-glass, of "Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!" But let us not be unjust. To suppose a whole nation so sunk in moral dignity as not even to wish for freedom, is to suppose what never was true. In Germany there are few who do not wish for freedom;-there are many, and it is an increasing number, who cry for it,-but with what hope? Contemplate that] mighty, that quintuple power, which I have in these pages shewn to be arrayed against popular freedom. Contemplate the net so artfully woven out of all the fears, hopes, and interests of the great mass, the threads of which are all gathered up and held in the hands of government. Contemplate the military, the police, the censorship, the patronage and employment, and the order-and-title-distributing systems, and say who first shall risk his daily bread; who first shall make himself a useless victim, whose bloody experience and knowledge of honour gives him no hope that others will rise to his rescue? It is too much to demand of any man who lives like the German official in great bodily comfort, and we are not yet at the end of his long political chain. a view of another pinching link. Let us take CHAPTER VII. THE ROMAN LAW, WITH ITS SECRET TRIBUNALS. This I have already stated that the German Emperors early adopted the title of the Roman empire, and with it the Roman law, which of all others is best adapted to the wishes of arbitrary power. law continues in force to this hour. Amid a people of fifty millions, who boast of being, and are boasted of as the most philosophical and thorough explorers into the fundamental principles of things, this barbarous system of law, which outrages every principle of liberty of the subject and of enlightened exercise of executive power in a state, is not only the universal system east of the Rhine, but is gravely taught and explained, and eulogized too, by the professors of every German university. It must be understood that the science and practice of jurisprudence are taught, not as with us, in inns of court, but wholly and solely in the universities in Germany; and the united legal professors in each university, under the name of the Spruchcolleg, pronounce decisions on the justice and legality of all adjudged cases, where any appeal is made from the ordinary courts. Would it be believed, that at this time of day in any country of Europe, but especially in a country claiming so high a rank for its philosophical and enlightened spirit, for its profound learning, for its theorizing and illumination on the subject of education, for its great nationally organized system of educational instruction; that in this country there was no such thing as open courts of justice, or juries, or judges sitting in public, and hearing evidence in the presence of the accused; but that all criminal processes, and almost all civil ones, are conducted before secret tribunals, secret judges, and without the accused seeing his accusers? That is fact; every prisoner is conducted, not to a fair and open examination, where positive evidence is brought out in the face of day, and with the public eye upon it; where the prisoner can call his witness openly to rebut false charges, and then is not left to the dictum of a single secret judge, but to the verdict of twelve men of his own class who decide on oath, and before the whole public, of his guilt or innocence, but to all intents and purposes in as complete a secret inquisition as ever sat in Spain? Yet such at this hour is the state of things in enlightened and philosophic Germany; and this state of things is praised and defended by the most learned professors of law, and declared. to be better than the trial by jury of the British |