ion of thinkers and
poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a
thinking nation among the nations.

But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?
With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?

No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution
is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly
developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All
around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little
work and little production. For the next decade the question will be,
not where is the demand but where is the supply?

The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'
War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we
do not notice the decline.

Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a
highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more
than valuable production or cheap production; it is something
exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production
itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the
schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.

It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did
not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once
with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic
and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like
obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership
and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national
egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.

The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us
which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we
cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will
further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for
a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had
in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and
democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in
their internationalism.

There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first
time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and
around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will
be som