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influence and corruption to win the party of the stadholder to her own uses.

The republic was in many ways dear to the United States. It had given a resting-place to their immigrant pilgrims, and dismissed them to the New World with lessons of religious toleration. It had planted the valley of the Hudson; and in New York and New Jersey its sons still cherished the language, church rule, and customs of their parent nation. The Dutch saw in the American struggle a repetition of their own history; and the Americans found in them the evidence that a small but resolute state can triumph over the utmost efforts of the mightiest and wealthiest empire.

The people who dwelt between the Alps and the northern seas, between France and the Slaves, founded no colonies in America; but they saw in the rising people of the New World many who traced their lineage back to the same ancestry with themselves, and they claimed a fellowship with the youthful nation which was struggling for freedom of mind and free institutions. Their great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, the contemporary of the American revolution, the man who alone of Germans can with Leibnitz take a place by the side of Plato and Aristotle, reformed philosophy as Luther had reformed the church, on the principle of the self-activity of the individual mind. His method was that of the employment of mind in its freedom; and his fidelity to human freedom has never been questioned and never can be. He accepted the world as it is, only with the obligation that it is to be made better. His political philosophy enjoins a constant struggle to lift society out of its actual imperfect state, which is its natural condition, into a higher and better one, by deciding every question, as it arises, in favor of reform and progress, and keeping open the way for the elimination of all remaining evil. He condemned slavery, and he branded the bargaining away of troops by one state to another without a common cause. "The rights of man," he said, "are dear to God, are the apple of the eye of God on earth;' and he wished an hour each day set aside for all children to learn them and take them to heart. He was one of the first, perhaps the very first, of the German nation to up

hold, even at the risk of his friendships, the cause of the United States.

Lessing contemplated the education of his race as carried forward by one continued revelation of truth, the thoughts of God, present in man, creating harmony and unity, and leading toward higher culture. In his view, the class of nobles was become superfluous: the lights of the world were they who gave the clearest utterance to the divine ideas. He held it a folly for men of a republic to wish for a monarchy: the chief of a commonwealth, governing a free people by their free choice, has a halo that never surrounded a king. Though he was in the employ of the duke of Brunswick, he loathed from his inmost soul the engagement of troops in a foreign war, either as volunteers or as sold by their prince. "How came Othello," he asks, "into the service of Venice? Had the Moor no country? Why did he let out his arm and blood to a foreign state?" And he published to the German nation this lesson: "The Americans are building in the New World the lodge of humanity."

At Weimar, in 1779, Herder, the first who vindicated for the songs of the people their place in the annals of human culture, published these words: "The boldest, most godlike thoughts of the human mind, the most beautiful and greatest works, have been perfected in republics; not only in antiquity, but in medieval and more modern times, the best history, the best philosophy of humanity and government, is always republican; and the republic exerts its influence, not by direct intervention, but mediately by its mere existence." The United States, with its mountain ranges, rivers, and chains of lakes in the temperate zone, seemed to him shaped by nature for a new civilization.

Of the poets of Germany, the veteran Klopstock beheld in the American war the inspiration of humanity and the dawn of an approaching great day. He loved the terrible spirit which emboldens the peoples to grow conscious of their power. With proud joy he calls to mind that, among the citizens of the young republic, there were many Germans who gloriously fulfilled their duty in the war of freedom. "By the rivers of America light beams forth to the nations, and in part from

Germans." So he wrote, embalming the martyrdom of Herkimer and his German companions.

Less enthusiastic, but not less consistent, was Goethe. Of plebeian descent, by birth a republican, born like Luther in the heart of Germany, educated like Leibnitz in the central university of Saxony, when seven years old he and his father's house were partisans of Frederic, and rejoiced in his victories as the victories of the German nation. In early youth he, like those around him, was interested in the struggles of Corsica; joined in the cry of "Long live Paoli!" and gave his hearty sympathy to the patriot in exile. Ideas of popular liberty led him, in his twenty-second year or soon after, to select the theme for his first tragedy from the kindred epoch in the history of the Netherlands. But the interest of the circle in which he moved became far more lively when, in a remote part of the world, a whole people showed signs that it would make itself free. He classed the Boston tea-party of 1773 among the prodigious events which stamped themselves most deeply on his mind in childhood. Like everybody around him, he wished the Americans success, and "the names of Franklin and Washington shone and sparkled in his heaven of politics and war." When to all this was added reform in France, he and the youth of Germany promised themselves and all their fellow-men a beautiful and even a glorious future. The thought of emigrating to America passed placidly over his imagination, leaving no more mark than the shadow of a flying cloud as it sweeps over a garden of flowers.

The sale of Hessian soldiers for foreign money called from him words of disdain; but his reproof of the young Germans who volunteered to fight for the American cause and then from faint-heartedness drew back, did not go beyond a smile at the contrast between their zeal and their deeds. He congratulated America that it was not forced to bear up the traditions of feudalism; and, writing or conversing, used none but friendly words of the United States, as "a noble country." During all his life coming in contact with events that were changing the world, he painted them to his mind in their order and connection. Twenty years before the movements of 1848 he foretold with passionless serenity that, as certainly as the

Americans had thrown the tea-chests into the sea, so certainly it would come to a breach in Germany between princes and people, if monarchy should not reconcile itself with freedom; and just before the French revolution of 1830 he published his opinion that the desire for self-government, which had succeeded so well in the colonies of North America, was sustaining the battle in Europe without signs of weariness.

Schiller was a native of Würtemburg, the part of Germany most inclined to idealism; in medieval days the stronghold of German liberty; renowned for its numerous free cities, the wide distribution of land among small freeholders, the total absence of great landed proprietaries, the comparative extinction of the old nobility. Equally in his hours of reflection and in his hours of inspiration, his sentiments were such as became the poet of the German nation invigorated by the ideas of Kant. The victory which his countrymen won against the Vatican and against error for the freedom of reason was, as he wrote, a victory for all nations and for endless time. He was ever ready to clasp the millions of his fellow-men in his embrace, to give a salutation to the whole world; and, glowing with indignation at princes who met the expenses of profligacy by selling their subjects to war against the rights of mankind, a few years later he brought their crime upon the stage.

Under the German kinglings, the sense of the nation could not express itself freely, but German political interest centred in America. Translations of British pamphlets on the war, including "Price upon Liberty," were printed in Brunswick. It is related by Niebuhr that the political ideas which in his youth most swayed the mind of Germany grew out of its fellow-feeling with the United States in their struggle for independence.

While the truest and best representatives of German intelligence applauded Americans as the founders of a republic, the best of the German princes approved their rising in arms against a sovereign who attempted to strip them of their rights. Duke Ernest of Saxony, cultivated by travel in Holland, England, and France, ruled his principality of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg with wisdom and justice. By frugality and simplicity in his court, he restored the disordered finances of the duchy,

and provided for great public works and for science. Though the king of England was his near relation, he put aside the offers of enormous subsidies for troops to be employed in America. When, ten years later, he was ready to risk his life and independence in the defence of the unity and the liberties of Germany, these are the words in which he cheered on his dearest friend to aid in curbing the ambition of Austria: "All hope for our freedom and the preservation of the constitution is not lost. Right and equity are on our side; and the wise Providence, according to my idea of it, cannot approve, cannot support, perjury and the suppression of all rights of citizens and of states. Of this principle the example of America is the eloquent proof. England met with her deserts. It was necessary that her pride should be bowed, and that oppressed innocence should carry off the victory. Time cannot outlaw the rights of mankind.”

The friend to whom these words were addressed was the brave, warm-hearted Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar, who, in 1776, being then of only nineteen years, refused a request for leave to open recruiting offices at Ilmenau and Jena for the English service, though he consented to the delivery of vagabonds and convicts. When, in the last days of November 1777, the prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, as the go-between of the British ministry, made unlimited offers for some of his battalions, the patriot prince called his ministers to a conference, and, supported by the unanimous advice of those present, on the third of December he answered: "There are, in general, many weighty reasons why I cannot yield my consent to deliver troops into foreign service and pay;" and it is minuted on the draft that "Serenissimus himself took charge of posting the letter."

The signature of Goethe, the youngest minister of Weimar, is wanting to the draft, for he was absent on a winter trip to the Hartz Mountains; but that his heart was with his colleagues appears from his writing simultaneously from Goslar: "How am I again brought to love that class of men which is called the lower class, but which assuredly for God is the highest! In them moderation, contentment, straightfor wardness, patience, endurance, all the virtues, meet together."

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