ABSTRACT
Austria and Prussia were large states with a European role to play; in consequence, they were far less inclined than the smaller states of the Bund to allow popular representatives any hand in making important decisions. In Austria any constitutional system was rendered even more difficult by the multiplicity of nationalities. In Germany the number of prosperous middle-class people with an interest in politics was much smaller. The greater part of Germany’s intelligentsia, both conservative and liberal, looked with admiration at political life in England. When all liberal movements in Germany were persecuted, many of their champions fled to Switzerland or Strasbourg, and from there smuggled revolutionary pamphlets into Baden for use in promoting agitation throughout Germany. In constitutional development North Germany lagged behind the South, and this was principally the fault of the landowning nobility. Saxony joined the German Zollverein and in railway construction and industrial progress outstripped all the other German states.
