The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-06 00:00:00

THE MINOR GERMAN STATES.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
LEIPSIC, Sept. 3.
If you are desirous to study the symptoms of
political movement in Germany, mind you do not
come to look for them in the German cities—not,
at least, in these dead months of August and Sep.
tember. The very landlord of your hotel is out of
town, and the representative of your Gracious
Queen is not only off to the Hartz mountains him-
self, but he has actually shut up shop, and left no•
body but a " small servant," a little, slovenly
wench, to watch the dust as it gathers on the shelves
of his desolate consular office. There was a meet-
ing of all the German agriculturists the other day
in Hanover; a convention of all the German
jurists yesterday at Brunswick. The papers
throughout the land are full of their long-winded
deliberations; yet there was scarcely a soul astir
about the streets of either city, and we were not
aware of any even temporary ignition of the waters
of the Leine or the Ocker, as they flowed peaceably
and somewhat murkily past their walls. It must,
one would think, go rather hard with a traveller,
who should find neither owls at Athens nor
earthen pots at Samos, nor coals at Newcastle.
But what would you say of a poor wight who
had been baffled in his endeavours to fall in
with a bookseller in Leipsio ? Yet such was the
case with me. All the gentlemen in that line of
business are to rendezvous here for the great
Michaelmas Fair, and, in the meanwhile, they leave
their comptoirs to take care of themselves. Of the
clerks that are left behind one was blind, another a
stutterer, a third hopelessly stupid—so I went no
farther with my inquiries. Of course, when
everybody is out of town, the town still swarms
with nobodies. At Hanover, which looked like
Palmyr a the opera season opened on the 28th
ult. ; here, in Leipsic, on the Ist instant. The
houses in both places were crammed, though 'the
spectacle was something worse than thirdsrate.
Some of the amateurs who called out " Hernan
Cortes !" nine times at the Court Theatre the other
day were certainly human beings, but they are not
the people you want—not the political men. For
these there is, at this bathing season, a general
holyday. Were even all the politicians at their
homes instead of at their Kursaals, one might doubt
whether there can at any time be such a thing as
political life in Germany. Even newspapers,
though possibly as numerous in this country as any-
where else in the world, seem not to be for the Ger-
mans the daily bread they are for other civilised
people. Printed and published they are, no doubt,
and, it may be surmised, read and inwardly di-
gested, but they are not as übiquitous as in France
or Italy, where newsmen are to be heard bawling
underneath every window ; nor as in the United
States of America, where a news shop is esta-
blished at every third door of every street,
or at the door of every bar-room of every hotel ;
nor, finally, as in England, where every railway
station is infested with news-dealers, both peripa-
tetic and stationary. Even in Hamburg, the
busiest and most advanced centre of German com-
mercial life, the Nacrichten or the Borsenhalle can
only be had on subscription, or, at the utmost, by
way of favour, on application to the respective
offices. I suppose the Germans take in such
for home consumption ; the reading-rooms of the
best hotels profess to keep the papers for the
benefit of their customers, and a stray copy, now
one, now of another, of these periodical publics•
tions is to be found strewn here and there
about the table, but as a general rule, only the stale
copy, beer-stained, redolent of tobacco, torn to
tatters, and hanging, not without difficulty, on the
steel or wicker frame, which makes the rending or
even the holding of it, a most troublesome task.
Oat of doors, it is neither the street porter nor the
dienstmann nor the drowsky driver that is ever to
be seen, as in other countries, with a newspaper in
his hand. You hardly ever fall in with a fellow•
traveller in a railway carriage, be it of the first,
second, or third class, that happens to be so em-
ployed. Were it ever the case, twenty to one your
reading vis-a,vis would, like yourself, be a stranger
in the land. Whatever the cause may be, although
every German can read, although writing and print-
ing men are to be found in this country in greater
numbers than anywhere else in Europe, reading
seems to be a solemn ceremony, only to be per-
formed within closed walls, in the sanctuary of
home,