William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[362] district is not far from Varzin, where the German Chancellor lives. Yet Prussia has not fed the tide of emigration much ; her contribution for the whole forty years (1820-60)being less than a hundred thousand souls. The floods have come from Hessen, Baden, and the badly-governed duchies, where Fritz and Karl had each a prince of his own to rule over him. These things are gone, and with them some of the pests which drove brave men and true patriots from their native land.

Bismarck, as the American Minister in Berlin reports, is looking at this question with a statesman's eye. He sees the people moving, but he also sees that they are stirred by causes not to be removed by passports and police.

“ We have no right to interfere with a man's liberty to seek his bread elsewhere. A strong desire has seized the minds of many persons to seek a new home, where they can get more food and better shelter for themselves. We may regret, we cannot condemn, this wish. The right to a free change of domicile is sacred, and we cannot say the principle is wrong because a man chooses to exchange his domicile on the Rhine for a domicile on the ”