The reaction against this bitter disappointment was led by the eager German youth, who, inspired by liberal ideals, now thirsted for freedom of thought, of speech, and of action.  Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot, organized everywhere Turnvereine, or gymnastic clubs, as a tangible form of expressing this demand.  Among the students of the universities liberal patriotic clubs called Burschenschaften were organized, idealistic in their aims and impractical in their propaganda, where “every man with his bonnet on his head, a pot of beer in his hand, a pipe or seegar in his mouth, and a song upon his lips, never doubting but that he and his companions are training themselves to be the regenerators of Europe,” vowed “the liberation of Germany.”  Alas for the enthusiasms of youth!  In 1817 the Burschenschaften held a mass reunion at the Wartburg.  Their boyish antics were greatly exaggerated in the conservative papers and the governments increased their vigilance.  In 1819 Kotzebue, a reactionary publicist, was assassinated by a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, and the retaliation of the government was prompt and thoroughly Prussian—­gagging of the press and of speech, dissolution of all liberal organizations, espionage, the hounding of all suspects.  There seemed to remain only flight to liberal democratic America.  But the suppression of the clubs did not entirely put out the fires of constitutional desires.  These smoldered until the storms of ’48 fanned them into a fitful blaze.  For a brief hour the German Democrat had the feudal lords cowed.  Frederick William, the “romantic” Hohenzollern, promised a constitution to the threatening mob in Berlin; the King of Saxony and the Grand Duke of Bavaria fled their capitals; revolts occurred in Silesia, Posen, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau.  Then struck the first great hour of modern Prussia, as, with her heartless and disciplined soldiery, she restored one by one the frightened dukes and princes to their prerogatives and repressed relentlessly and with Junker rigor every liberal concession that had crept into laws and institutions.  Strangled liberalism could no longer breathe in Germany, and thousands of her revolutionists fled to America, bringing with them almost the last vestige of German democratic leadership.

In the meantime, economic conditions in Germany remained unsatisfactory and combined with political discontent to uproot a population and transplant it to a new land.  The desire to immigrate, stimulated by the transportation companies, spread like a fever.  Whole villages sold out and, with their pastor or their physician at their head, shipped for America.  A British observer who visited the Rhine country in 1846 commented on “the long files of carts that meet you every mile, carrying the whole property of these poor wretches who are about to cross the Atlantic on the faith of a lying prospectus.”  But these people were neither “poor wretches” nor dupes.  They had coin in their pockets, and