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[101] on the German system, and by calling in the Protestants of the North to help him, has set his improvements in motion, and the Emperor Alexander, by founding German universities and appointing German professors to them, have almost brought Bavaria and Russia into the league of letters. In this way, without noise and almost without notice, from Berne to St. Petersburg, and from Munich to Copenhagen, a republic has been formed, extending through all the great and small governments, and independent of the influence of them all, which by its activity unites all the interests of learning, while by its extent it prevents low prejudice from so often oppressing individual merit; and finally, by its aggregate power resting, as it must, on general opinion, it is able to exert a force which nothing that naturally comes under its influence can resist.

I could give you many curious instances and proofs of the efficiency of this system, and of its power to separate the men of letters from the other classes of society in their opinions and feelings; but I have room for only two.

When you talk with a man in civil life of his country, you will find that he means that peculiar and independent district in which he was born, as Prussia, or Hesse, etc.; and you will find, too, that his patriotic attachment to this spot is often as exclusive and vehement as that of John Bull or a true American. But talk with a man of letters, and you will instantly perceive that when he speaks of his country he is really thinking of all that portion of Germany, and the neighboring territories, through which Protestant learning and a philosophical mode of thinking are diffused. Nay, further, take a Prussian, or Hanoverian, or Hessian politician or soldier, and he will talk with as much horror of expatriation from Prussia, Hanover, or Hesse as Bonaparte ever did of ‘denationalizing’ a flag; but a professor or a rector of a gymnasium moves as willingly from one of these countries into another, and feels himself as much at home after his removal, as if it were only from Cassel to Marburg, or from Berlin to Halle.

My second proof is, that they not only feel themselves to belong to an independent body of men, but are really considered to be so by the several governments under which they happen to live. I do not now refer to the unlimited freedom of the universities, and the modes of instruction there, which make each professor independent; I refer merely to the mode in which professors are removed from one country to another. The king of Prussia would not appoint to any military or civil service, or even to any clerical office in his dominions, any but a Prussian; the king of Hanover, any but a


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