History of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 8: And of the Nineteenth Till the Overthrow of the French Empire, with Particular Reference to Mental Cultivation and Progress (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from History of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 8: And of the Nineteenth Till the Overthrow of the French Empire, With Particular Reference to Mental Cultivation and Progress

There was at that time, as we ourselves can testify from experi ence, no need of secret societies in order to separate the patriots from the mere official men of public life; the abhorrence felt for those cowards, traitors, and selfish men who had betrayed, and still con tinned to make merchandise of their country, bound all true Ger man natures ih one common bond. Napoleon, Savary, and Davoust, as military men, had as little faith in human nature as Wellington and Soult; according to their Opinion, all the blame was to be as cribed to the Tugena'bzmd and the conspirators; they therefore filled the country with Spies, traitors, and bailiffs, and by this very means the number of conspirators continually increased. Unhappily, romanticism, mysticism, and fooleries with religion, and especially with the middle ages, were introduced by the secret societies of those days from their absurd attachment to what was Old, and their aversion to the new forced upon their acceptance. Even Von Stein and his friends regarded knightly usages, and dynastic privileges, castles and mounds, as things worthy of admiration. They placed too unlimited confidence on civic associations and municipalities, in the narrow sense of the German jurists, on unimprovable princes expelled together with their families, upon the nobility, priestcraft, and blind faith of the old times, not themselves to have passed from one ex treme to another. These secret associations against French dominion became,therefore, at a later period, associations in favour of feudality and hierarchy, and they themselves helped to destroy that inspiration for freedom which they had been earlier instrumental in exciting. How was it, indeed, to be expected that a Count Munster, a F rei herr von Stein, and aniebuhr, honest and vigorous as he was, should have been able to keep themselves free from the prejudices of their class, from scholastic systems, and from a preference for a constitution fearfully oligarchical in practice - such as that of the English pluto cracy, which had become an ideal of perfection Since the time of Montesquieu, and justly to estimate the genuine and true sense of the French institutions? They did not see how easily what was un practical in French constitutionalism, and what was egotistical and autocratic in. Napoleon's counterfeit, might be separated from the French, and in the noblest sense cosmopolitan principles of the first (monarchical) national assemblies. We admit, however, that the indefinite feeling and poetical phase of the past then called forth, had a more powerful effect upon the people than any true historical knowledge, or clear and definite ideas would have had. We, there fore, willingly acknowledge the great use of the Tugendbund and its affiliations.

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