* * * * *

Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the foregoing
portrait of the German peasant that Riehl is not a man who looks at
objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer;
and they will be ready to believe what he tells us in his Preface,
namely, that years ago he began his wanderings over the hills and plains
of Germany for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the
people, that completion of his historical, political, and economical
studies which he was unable to find in books. He began his
investigations with no party prepossessions, and his present views were
evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. He was,
first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place a political
author. The views at which he has arrived by this inductive process, he
sums up in the term--_social-political-conservatism_; but his
conservatism is, we conceive, of a thoroughly philosophical kind. He
sees in European society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to
disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply
destructive of social vitality. {164} What has grown up historically can
only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws.
The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but
the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings
who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to
each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place
only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. Take the familiar
example of attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as effective
as the process of cutting off poppy-heads in a cornfield. _Jedem
Menschem_, says Riehl, _ist sein Zopf angeboren_, _warum soll denn der
sociale Sprachgebrauch nicht auch sein Zopf haben_?--which we may
render--"As long as snobism runs in the blood, why should it not run in
our speech?" As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society,
you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter
prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to
get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest
without the secular growth of trunk and branch.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of
language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is