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Kaspar Hauser.
TIGTEN POLITISCHEN ANSPRUCHS.”—‘ Kaspar Hauser was the
embodiment of an unjustifiable political claim.”
This formidable sentence refers to the treaty of Reib, September,
813, and to a secret treaty of April 23, 1815, wherein Austriy
and Bavaria agreed that the lands which Austria had taken from
Bavaria should be made good by the cession to Bavaria of the
Rhenish Pfalz, in case of the extinction of the direct line ip
Baden.
The opinion held by King Ludwig I. is therefore supposed to
be due to the fact that Bavaria wanted to get possession of the
Rhine-Pfalz, and King Ludwig hoped to receive those provinces
as a reward for restoring Kaspar Hauser to the throne.
The truth is, however, that Ludwig retained his belief in Kaspar,
and his interest in the story, to the end of his life, although he
lived more than thirty years after Kaspar Hauser’s death, and
Baden remained in undisturbed possession of the Rhenish Pfalz
Von der Linde asserts confidently that Kaspar Hauser was
nothing but an ignorant peasant boy, who was shrewd enough to
deceive everybody around him for years, and who finally killed
himself either by mistake or because he considered suicide the
only way of escape from the consequences of imposture.
But the assertions and arguments of the author are continually
overthrown by the information he communicates.
Thus, he has gathered up all the long-forgotten rumours of
vagabond peasant boys and secreted illegitimate children, and told
the narratives in full, his object being, apparently, to bring contempt
upon the Kaspar Hauser story by showing how many other stories
fell to pieces after due examination. But he fails to perceive that
the very fact of so many persons having been suggested as identi:
cal with the foundling of Nuremberg, proves that a boy could not
run away from home, or from school, or from a monastery, with-
out being discovered, while, in all the cases mentioned, the
evidence was conclusive that the individual examined was not
Kaspar Hauser.
