It was perhaps significant of our need of what Napoleon called a
"revival of civic morals" that the public appeal against such a
reversal of our traditions had to be based largely upon the
contributions to American progress made from other revolutions;
the Puritans from the English, Lafayette from the French, Carl
Schurz and many another able man from the German upheavals in the
middle of the century.
A distinguished German scholar writing at the end of his long
life a description of his friends of 1848 who made a gallant
although premature effort to unite the German states and to
secure a constitutional government, thus concludes: "But not a
few saw the whole of their lives wrecked, either in prison or
poverty, though they had done no wrong, and in many cases were
the finest characters it has been my good fortune to know. They
were before their time; the fruit was not ripe, as it was in
1871, and Germany but lost her best sons in those miserable
years." When the time is ripe in Russia, when she finally yields
to those great forces which are molding and renovating
contemporary life, when her Cavour and her Bismark finally throw
into the first governmental forms all that yearning for juster
human relations which the idealistic Russian revolutionists
embody, we may look back upon these "miserable years" with a
sense of chagrin at our lack of sympathy and understanding.
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