preservation and
restoration of Prussia and Germany was, that the nobility must renounce
their valued privileges in civil offices, and officers' appointment.

Since the rising of the people in 1813, the life and prosperity of the
State has mainly rested on the power and progress of culture in the
German citizen. The citizens are no longer, as in the middle ages, a
class confronting the other classes; they form the nation. Whoever
would place himself in opposition to it by egotistical pretensions,
begins a hopeless struggle. All the privileges by which the nobility up
to the present day have sought to maintain a separate position among
the people, have become a misfortune and fatality to themselves. Many
of the best among them have long comprehended this; they are in every
domain of intellectual and material interests, in art, science, and
State, the representatives of the new life of the nation. Even the
country noble, who within the boundary of his village district holds
faithfully and lovingly to the recollections of the olden time, has in
some degree made friends with the new time, and in some sort yielded
unwillingly to its demands. But among the weaker of them there remains
even now somewhat of the hearty disposition of the old mounted rovers.
The modern _Junker_ is an unfavourable caricature of the nobility; if
one observes closely, he is only a pretentious continuation of the old
Krippenreiter. Under uniforms and decorations are concealed the same
hatred of the culture of the times, the same prejudices, the same
arrogance, the same grotesque respect for decaying privileges, and the
same rough egotism with regard to the commonwealth. Not a few of
these court and country nobles still consider the State like the full
store-room of a neighbour, as their ancestors did two centuries ago;
against these rise the hatred and contempt of the people.

CHAPTER III.

THE CITIZEN AND HIS SHOOTING FESTIVALS.
(1300-1800.)

It is on the simple truth, that every man is only valuable to his
nation and State in proportion to his work, that the power and pride of
citizenship rests; that is to say, in so far as he contributes to the
welfare of others. But eighteen hundred years were necessary to
establish this principle, and to make it perceptible to Germans, and
still does the struggle continue to realize it, to introduce into the
cities free comp