It is not without a meaning, we believe, that the zealous German hero of the book is furnished with the money necessary for carrying out his schemes by a fellow-countryman and friend, who had returned to his fatherland with a fortune acquired beyond the Atlantic.

Our talented author has certainly not lost sight of the fact that Germany, as a whole, has as little recovered from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War as the eastern districts of Prussia have recovered from the effects of the war with France in the present century.

Let the faults and failings of our national German character be what they may (and we should like to know what nation has endured and survived similar spoliation and partition), the greatest sin of Germany during the last two hundred years, especially in the less-favored north, has always been its poverty--the condition of all classes, with few exceptions.

National poverty, however, becomes indeed a political sin when a people, by its cultivation, has become constitutionally fit for freedom.
In the background of the whole picture of the disordered and sickly condition of our social circumstances here so vividly presented, the author has plainly discerned Dante's noble proverb-- "Di liberta indipendenza e primo grado." The existence of independent citizen-families qualified and ready for every public service, though beyond the need of such employment--this is the fundamental condition of a healthy development of political freedom, alike impregnable by revolution and reaction; this is the only sure ground and basis on which a constitutional form of government can be reared and administered with advantage to every class, repressing alike successfully absolutism and democracy.
And now we have reached the point where we are enabled to gather up, and to express to the reader, without desiring to forestall his own judgment, or to load him with axioms and formulas beyond his comprehension, the beautiful fundamental idea of the book, clearly and simply.
We would express it thus: The future of all European states depends mainly on three propositions, and the politics of every statesman of our period are determined by the way in which he views them.
These propositions are, 1st.

The fusion of the educated classes, and the total abolition of bureaucracy, and all social barriers between the ancient nobility and the educated classes in the nation, especially the industrial and mercantile population.
2d.