movement for the unification of Germany. A national Parliament was
assembled at Frankfort, and in 1849 it offered to the King of Prussia
the German imperial crown; but the constitution it had drafted was so
democratic, and the opposition of the German princes so great, that
Frederick William felt obliged to refuse the offer. An attempt was then
made, at a Parliament held in Erfurt, to establish a "narrower Germany"
under Prussian leadership; but this movement also came to nothing. The
Austrian government, paralyzed for a time by revolts in its own
territories, had re-established its power and threatened Prussia with
war. Russia supported Austria, and Prussia submitted at Olmütz (1850).
In these stirring years, Bismarck--first as a member of the United Diet
and then as a representative in the new Prussian Chamber of
Deputies--made himself prominent by hostility to the constitutional
movement and championship of royal prerogative. He defended the King's
refusal of the imperial crown, because "all the real gold in it would be
gotten by melting up the Prussian crown"; and he compared the pact which
the King, by accepting the Frankfort constitution, would make with the
democracy, to the pact between the huntsman and the devil in the
'Freischütz': sooner or later, he declared, the people would come to the
Emperor, and pointing to the Imperial arms, would say, "Do you fancy
this eagle was given you for nothing?" He sat in the Erfurt Parliament,
but had no faith in its success. He opposed the constitution which it
adopted, although this was far more conservative than that drafted at
Frankfort, because he deemed it still too revolutionary. During the
Austro-Prussian disputes of 1850 he expressed himself, like the rest of
the Prussian Conservatives, in favor of reconciliation with Austria, and
he even defended the convention of Olmütz.

After Olmütz, the German Federal Diet, which had disappeared in 1848,
was reconstituted at Frankfort, and to Frankfort Bismarck was sent, in