ration of the Peoples, will not only decide for
each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort
to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the
sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what
we are seeking.

This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what
oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
a political ideal.

We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be
ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.

Wh