impossible without much practice.  Why the Germans should have kept their Gothic lettering and peculiar script, when all other European nations, save the Russian, have adopted the Roman, it is difficult to say, unless it be with them a matter of national pride.  And they have been unnational in so many things!  That the Russians should have their own alphabet is natural enough; they have sounds and letters and combinations—­which neither the Germanic nor the Romanic group of languages possess.  And yet both in Polish and Zechish, where the same sounds exist to a great extent, the deficiencies are made up by accented and dotted letters.  So, though we have a universal standard of spelling for names and places on the Continent, we find in our most popular histories and geographies a divergence in the lesser known Russian names, not far removed from that we daily meet in the nomenclature of the gods of Hindoo mythology.

The like plea of necessity cannot be urged in regard to the Teutonic or Scandinavian languages.  Within the last quarter of a century, the chief scientific works issued in Northern Germany, and many even in Southern, have been printed in the Roman character.  Were there no other argument in favor of its universal adoption, it has been found less trying to the eyes.  It can be read by all nations; and the other is at best but an additional difficulty for the learner, even in the case of native children, who are plagued with two alphabets and two diametrically opposite systems of penmanship in their earliest years.  The result is evident:  a good hand is a rare thing In Germany.  It is a good sign, that of late years public acts and records, works of learning, all the higher literature, in fact, not purely national, as poetry and romance, are all printed in the Roman character.  Nor will any look upon this as a servile imitation.  Some of the most national of German writers and scholars, as the brothers Grimm, have pronounced themselves loudly in favor of the change.  The tendency of the age is towards universality.  It will occur to none to talk of French imitation because chemists make use of the excellent and universally applicable system of the decimal French weights and measures.

What has been said above is not altogether irrelevant as characterizing the tendency of the higher institutions of learning.  Every movement in Germany, even the least, since the Reformation, whose chief propagators were professors in the universities,—­Luther, Reuchlin, Melancthon,—­every permanent and pervading conquest of the new and good over the old and worn-out, has issued from the lecture-room.  Whatever sticklers for old forms and crab-like progress may be found, there is always an overbalancing power.  The unity of Germany as one nation has never stood a better chance of being realized than now, when the very men who were students and flocked as volunteers when the iron hand of Napoleon I. weighed heavily on their Fatherland stand as lecturers in the days of Napoleon III., warning of the past, and preaching louder than Schiller or Koerner or Arndt for the brotherhood of Prussian and Bavarian, of those that dwell on the Rhine and those that inhabit the regions of the Danube.