escuing from
the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and
duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the
worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of
Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to
destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the
disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of
officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our
debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the
stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
Well, something's got done; all will come right.

No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until
you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and
compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it
staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do
you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines,
trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of
which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to
be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on
Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your
thought? Where is the thought of Germany?

We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be,
what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the
Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
of Germany.

This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and
the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground
in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.

This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak
in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and
understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration
have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.
For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror,
not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it
is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to
represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
the spirit; and far as we are from being a nat