ABSTRACT
The National Assembly was a representative and weighty gathering, for its 550 members included most of the political and many of the best-known intellectual leaders of Germany. The draft constitution drawn up on this basis adopted certain features of the abandoned Frankfort constitution, but omitted just those provisions which to the Liberals were most important. “The German nation is about to give itself the freest of all constitutions, and no power on earth can prevent it,” Beckerath had said when the Assembly was in the midst of the debates on the charter of national liberties. Russia and Austria demanded jointly that Prussia should accept the action of the Diet, evacuate Hesse at once, and leave the question of German unity alone for the present, since it created only trouble and ill-will. German emigration to America heretofore had for the most part been the emigration of peasants and labourers, broken by poverty or harassed by intolerable feudal customs.
