they will
again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
interests and speculations.

In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_
look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like.
We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into
the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we
have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.

In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.

That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the
welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a prid