contact with the world outside her frontiers. The country defined by Frederick the Great as an earthly Paradise inhabited by animals had sunk into a material and spiritual decadence without parallel among the larger States of central Europe. When the French Revolution burst upon the world the realm of the Wittelsbachs was rotten to the core. The Illuminati had been suppressed; reaction and superstition reigned supreme; and the later years of Karl Theodor, surrounded by his bastards, are among the darkest of Bavarian history. The Government's sole method of confronting the perils of the time was to tighten the censorship, to forbid the circulation of French newspapers, to bring education under stricter control, and to compel candidates for office to swear that they belonged to no secret association. The spiritless and ignorant people had sunk so low that for a few years longer these miserable expedients availed to stave off the period of inevitable change; but, on the death of its degenerate ruler in 1799 and the accession of his cousin Max Joseph of Zweibrücken, French ideas' flowed into the country like a torrent and carried away the ancient landmarks of Church and State in their impetuous onset.

Max Joseph, the last Elector and the first King of Bavaria, had been a colonel in the French army and lived with his regiment in Strassburg till the outbreak of the Revolution, when he migrated to Mannheim. To his easy-going nature rancorous hate was impossible, and he never lost his old affection for France. 'I was born there,' he remarked to the French chargé d'affaires on his accession, and I beg you to regard me as a Frenchman. Please inform the Directory that it has no truer friend than myself.' The British Minister in Munich reported the atmospheric change at Court, and drew an unflattering portrait of the new ruler.

'The character of the present Elector is such, I fear, as offers little prospect of happiness to his subjects, the more so as he is surrounded by persons supposed to be devoted to the French Government, particularly a certain M. de Montgelas, who governs him. Fomenters of revolution remain unmolested here at a moment when many respectable but unfortunate émigrés are persecuted and ill-treated. I have seen with pain the hordes of Jacobins with which this place

swarms, and have in secret condemned the system by which they are tolerated.'

These secret conversations naturally reached the ears of the Elector, who showed himself decidedly chilling in the only audience that he granted, and revenged himself by asking for another Minister.

Montgelas, the chief of the 'Jacobins,' possessed the energy and ability which his weak and benevolent master lacked. The creator of modern Bavaria was the grandson of a Savoy official, whose son emigrated to Bavaria and married a German wife. The future statesman entered the service of the State at the age of twenty; but, like many other clever young men, he listened to the siren voices of Illuminati. On the dissolution of the Order he lost the favour of the Elector, and resolved to seek his fortunes at Zweibrücken, where he won the friendship and confidence of Max Joseph, the brother of the reigning Duke. When the Bavarian throne fell to his master, he returned to Munich and became the real ruler of the country for eighteen years.

The Dictator looked like a French noble and wrote and spoke French in preference to German. His aim was to accomplish peacefully for Bavaria what France had achieved at the cost of anarchy and bloodshed. He approached his task with the critical detachment of a foreigner, and made no secret of his contempt for cette nation bornée.' He determined to remove all institutions which were likely to thwart his will, beginning with the Estates and the Communes. Serfdom was abolished; the monasteries were thinned; and the material regeneration of the country taken energetically in hand. Protestants received equal rights from a prince who had married a Protestant and a Minister who felt equal contempt for every variety of religious belief. His most successful reforms were in the sphere of education. To root out Jesuit influence, the University of Ingoldstadt was abolished and a new seat of learning established at Landshut. The Academy of Sciences was revived, and scholars were imported from the Protestant north. Elementary education was freed from clerical control and rendered compulsory. In a few crowded years the accumulated rubbish of centuries was swept away, and

Bavaria was transformed from the most backward into one of the most advanced of German States. We are in the middle of a complete but bloodless revolution,' cried Anselm Feuerbach, the author of the new criminal code. The Minister was as little of a democrat as Frederick the Great; but his lucid and logical mind was offended by the fantastic absurdities of the traditional system, and like Hardenberg he had learned from France that revolutions could only be avoided by drastic reform.

The work of destruction and reconstruction accomplished by Stein and Hardenberg in Prussia and by Montgelas in Bavaria was carried out with even more uncompromising determination by the last Duke and the first King of Württemberg. When Frederick succeeded to the throne in 1797 he found the duchy small and poor and the power of the ruler circumscribed, at any rate in theory, by constitutional rights granted so far back as the Reformation. The liquidation of the Empire and the distribution of the smaller units among the larger States gave the ambitious autocrat the opportunity which he sought. With the new Catholic territories falling to his share he could do as he pleased; but he refused to rule over a country in a portion of which his will was fettered by traditional rights and claims. He therefore made a clean sweep of the good old law,' and introduced a uniform system of administration throughout his dominions. The coup d'état,' comments Treitschke,

'was the outcome not simply of a tyrant's overweening love of power but also of an undeniable political necessity. Over the united old and new Württemberg all the terrors of despotism now raged; but the autocracy endowed the country with indispensable institutions of the modern State. The Edict of Religions, King Frederick's best work, overthrew the dominion of the Lutheran Church and gave equal rights to both creeds. By the secularisation of Church property and the abolition of the treasury of the Estates, unity of national economy was established and the duty of paying regular taxes was carried into effect. The defenceless country once more acquired a little army fit for war. With revolutionary impetuosity the enemy of the Revolution established modern legal equality in his own State.'

The debauched and extravagant monarch was heartily

detested by his subjects; but the firm outlines of his work remained. Without the example of France to warn, to inspire and to guide, neither Montgelas nor Frederick could have overthrown the entrenched forces of tradition nor carried out the revolution from above of which South Germany stood in such desperate need.

In the third leading State of Southern Germany the transition from the old world to the new was more gradual and far less violent: for Karl Friedrich, the father of modern Baden, had not waited for the storm to break before setting his house in order. As a lifelong friend of France and a correspondent of Voltaire and the elder Mirabeau, the Duke regarded her efforts for liberty with considerable sympathy; and neither the atrocities of Paris nor the horrors of invasion shook his belief in the wisdom and necessity of unhasting and unresting reform. When he died in 1811, after a reign of seventy years, he had increased his territory tenfold and left behind him one of the freest, best educated and most prosperous States in Germany. The fall of Napoleon restored their independence to the Rheinbund princes; but the foreign leaven remained. The French Revolution left a deep mark on the rulers and peoples, the institutions and ideas of the south as well as the west of Germany; and the men of a later generation looked back on it with gratitude as the inauguration of a better age.

'My birth and childhood,' wrote Welcker, the leader of Baden liberalism in the middle decades of the 19th century, 'synchronised with the Revolution, before which nobody thought of a Constitution.' While Prussia remained in tutelage till 1848, the South-German States were furnished with Parliaments within a few years of the conclusion of peace. For a generation after Waterloo the Liberals of the south and west looked to Paris for their inspiration as the Liberals of the north looked to England, and spoke more of the French occupation than of the Wars of the Liberation. In the celebrated controversy between Thibaut and Savigny on the project of a Code for Germany, the Baden jurist appealed to reason and the Berlin Professor to tradition. The two most popular historical works of the Restoration era were the world-histories of Schlosser and Rotteck, which stretched priests and kings on the rack and shed

tears over the sufferings of the oppressed masses. The central doctrine of the French Revolution-that the destinies of a country should be controlled by the people as a whole and in the interest of the majority-found far fuller acceptance in the south than in Prussia, and has coloured political thought and practice ever since.

The wish was expressed by Georg Forster, the most eminent of the German victims of the Revolution, that his country should warm itself at the flame that had been kindled in France, without being burned. The aspiration was destined in large measure to be fulfilled. While in England the reform movement was thrown back forty years by the earthquake of 1789, in Germany it was strengthened and accelerated. If Saxony and Mecklenburg remained unaffected by the Revolution, and the governments of Hanover, Brunswick and HesseCassel on their return restored most of the old abuses, Prussia, the Rhineland and Southern Germany learned in a generation of conflict and suffering at least some of the secrets of enduring advance. Even Treitschke is compelled to admit that the constitutional ideas of the Revolution everywhere struck root in German soil; and without the Revolution the famous Article 13 of the Act creating the German Federation would never have seen the light. The political unification of the nation was deferred for a couple of generations; but the signal for its deliverance from the thraldom of mediæval institutions and antiquated ideas was sounded by the tocsin which rang out in 1789.

G. P. GOOCH.