The Government of Germany is daily becoming more oppres- sive.
Freedom of the Press has never existed either in the Empire or its component States, but freedom of thought and of the expression of thought in books has always been the boast of Germans. On Tuesday, however, the Berlin police warned the booksellers that they were instructed to seize all copies of a poem forty years old, because it contained an onslaught on the Prussian Kings. This was no less a work than Heine's "Schloss Legende," which is to be suppressed, even when the seizure of the volume spoils an entire edition of his works. This is as if the English police seized every copy of " Junius " or of a collection of Jacobite songs, and is the longest step backwards yet taken even by Prince Bismarck. There is something about such an act indescribably insulting to such a people as he governs, and which he will not trust even with literature a generation old. The persecution is so wretchedly incomplete, too. The police should seize all New Testaments, and tear out the Sermon on the Mount, because it says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," which is clearly fatal to the expansion, if not to the existence, of the Germanic Empire. If the meek are to inherit, the heritage of the Hohenzollerns will be but small.
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