THE GERMAN PRINCELINGS.

Grey River Argus, Issue 119, 16 October 1866, Page 3

THE GERMAN PRINCELINGS.

The " Spectator" of June 23, speaking of the effects of the war waging in Europe, says : — " We venture, early as the time is, to believe that the Kings and Dukes and Princes who have abdicated their duties, M'hose ignoble histories have terminated in a stampede, who instead of .dying by their thrones, have carried a hundred thousand men to swell the embarrassment of the Austrian Commissariat and the Bavarian Exchequer, will never regain their power. ' ' Blindly the wicked work the righteous will of heaven," and Count von Bismarck in his lawless unscrupulousness has at least cleared Europe of these dynasties, which after six hundred years of sway leave not a subject willing to die in their behalf. They have not been at all times irretrievably bad. Europe owes much both to Saxony and Hesse, for they protected the burly monk who first broke the charm of a Universal . Church. Two of the dynasties have done much for art, one has been a refuge in days of oppression for German Literature, all save Hesse have done something to make an essentially sensuous people believe the mind greater than the body, to keep alive in a military race the healthy faith that learning is nobler than military skill. But they have all resisted the development of a free national life, all have helped to dwarf the minds they have so assiduously refined, all have resisted the natural development of a race which probably contains within it the largest possibilities of original and noble life. All have striven with their utmost energies to keep up the evil faith that Heaven has committed the guidance of mankind to the members of a limited caste, now so interwoven as to be almost a single family, which, possessing for a thousand years a monopoly of the highest form of action has in that time failed to produce one benefactor to mankind. In the long stream of European liistory not one of this caste has ever received by popular acclaim the epithet " Good," but one lives in history under the title of the "Wise." So intensely has the evil effect of the Princelings' influence been felt, that for fifty years no subject of theirs has risen high enough in the world to think out a political reform without making their extinction the inevitable datum of his dream. And now they are gone, gone without a blow on their own soil for the independence of which they were so proud, and though the real battle has yet to be fought, believe they can never return. The defeat of North Germany, if accomplished, must be the work of many campaigns, and the nation, if united even for a year, will not again bear to be dismembered on behalf of a caste which at the first cannon-shot scuttled out of their homes to seek what for them at all events is the protection of a foreign power. They may settle among their old subjects as great nobles. They may receive half the vast estates which, though attached to their crowns, they have treated as private property. They may occupy as wealthy and privileged subjects an immense position among a great race, a position, if they will surrender their ruinous theory of intermarriage, even greater than that of English peers, because more visibly one of leadership. They may run a career as long and far more useful than that which has ended in this strange stampede, but they cannot again carve out Germany into estates for them to rule, half as modern kings half as mediaeval barons. Their work has been done, their time has passed, and with the occupation of Dresden the German Confederation — the league which for fifty years has in Central Europe maintained at once peace and tyranny, civilisation, and petty courts, free thought and political serfdom, prosperity and Princes, public order and enormous armies, commerce and \\ie ascendancy of soldiers — has, we believe, finally ceased to exist.