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Updated: May 16, 2025
At Hanover, five years later, was born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in May 1772, and our Coleridge in the same year and to carry on the parallel for another year, Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were all born in 1773.
That lecture was thronged; and to the sea of eager faces Steffens spoke forth the thought that simmered in every brain, the burning desire for war with Napoleon. He offered himself as a recruit: 200 students from Breslau and 258 from the University of Berlin soon flocked to the colours, and that, too, chiefly from the classes which of yore had detested the army.
Körner sang and fought; Arndt sounded the trumpet of German unity; Lützow gathered his famous "black troop," and the universities were so fervid that Professor Steffens of Breslau issued the first call for war against Napoleon; a summons which swept the students of that university, as well as those of Berlin, Königsberg, Halle, Jena, and Göttingen, into the ranks.
Steffens seems to think they're both about the same; but he's all wrong. The Philadelphia crowd runs up against the penal code. Tammany don't. The Philadelphians ain't satisfied with robbin' the bank of all its gold and paper money. They stay to pick up the nickels and pennies and the cop comes and nabs them. Tammany ain't no such fool.
It is true that for the moment the stupendous wealth and power of the "Large Interests," already more or less consolidated, threaten to overwhelm the rest. Mr. Steffens does not overstate when he says:
For a time it was my privilege to work under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible government" of cities, states, and the nation.
I'VE been readin' a book by Lincoln Steffens on 'The Shame of the Cities'. Steffens means well but, like all reformers, he don't know how to make distinctions. He can't see no difference between honest graft and dishonest graft and, consequent, he gets things all mixed up.
Lincoln Steffens calls these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion such are the sole springs of action." Well may Mr.
Steffens was pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw, you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal." I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical weakness of opportunist politics.
Stanton excepted, I again think of the dictum of Professor Steffens, and every day believe it more. Mr. Blair worse and worse; is more hot in support of McClellan, more determined to upset Stanton, and I heard him demand the return of a poor fugitive slave woman to some of Blair's Maryland friends.
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