ans,
that the stream of primitive and independent life still bear us on;
to them we owe everything that we have since become as a nation; and,
unless we have now perhaps come to an end, and unless the last drop
of blood inherited from them is dried up in our veins, we shall owe
to them all that we shall be in the future. Even the other Teutonic
races, among whom are our brethren, and who have now become foreigners
to us, owe to them their existence; when they conquered eternal Rome,
no one of all these nations yet existed; at that time the possibility
of their future origin was simultaneously won in the struggle.

These, and all others in universal history who have been of their type
of thought, have conquered because the eternal inspired them, and thus
this inspiration ever and of necessity prevails over him who is not
inspired. It is not the might of arms nor the fitness of weapons
that wins victories, but the power of the soul. He who sets himself
a limited goal for his sacrifices, and who can dare no further than a
certain point, surrenders resistance as soon as the danger reaches a
crisis where he cannot yield or dodge. He who has set himself no limit
whatsoever, but who hazards everything, even life--the highest
boon that can be lost on earth--never ceases to resist, and, if his
opponent has a more limited goal, he indubitably conquers. A people
that is capable, though it be only in its highest representatives and
leaders, of keeping firmly before its vision independence, the face
from the spirit world, and of being inspired with love for it, as
were our remotest forefathers, surely conquers a people that, like the
Roman armies, is used merely as a tool for foreign dominion and for
the subjugation of independent nations; for the former have everything
to lose, the latter have merely something to gain. But even a whim can
prevail over the mental attitude which regards war as a game of hazard
for temporal gain or loss, and which, even before the game starts, has
fixed the limit of the stake. Think, for example, of a Mohammed--not
the real Mohammed of history, concerning whom I confess that I have
no judgment, but the Mohammed of a distinguished French poet--who
had once become firmly convinced that he was one of the extraordinary
natures who are called to guide the obscure and common folk of earth,
and to whom, in consequence of this first presupposition, all his
whims, however meagre and limited they may really be,