c and glorified reflexion.

Bluff commonsense, which proffers such homely wisdom with beseeming
pathos would of course be morally indignant at the opponent who
attempted to show that the apple did not make the apple tree.

Modern historical research has shown how absolute monarchy appeared in
the period of transition, when the old feudal classes were decaying
and the medieval burgher class was evolving into the modern bourgeois
class, without either of the disputing parties being able to settle
accounts with the other.

The elements out of which absolute monarchy builds itself up cannot in
any way be its product: they rather form its preliminary condition,
the historic origin of which is too well known to be repeated here.
That absolute monarchy in Germany developed later and is lasting
longer is to be explained by reference to the distorted course of
development of the German middle class. The solution to the riddle of
this course of development is to be found in the history of commerce
and industry.

The decay of the German free towns, the destruction of the Order of
Knighthood, the defeat of the peasants--the local supremacy of the
princes which arose therefrom--the decay of German industry and of
German commerce, which were based on entirely medieval conditions, at
the same time as the modern world market was being opened up and
large-scale manufacture was thriving--the depopulation and the
barbarous condition that followed in the wake of the Thirty Years
War--the character of the reviving national branches of industry, such
as the small linen industry, which are adapted to patriarchal
conditions and relations--the nature of the articles of export, the
greater part of which belonged to agriculture, and therefore almost
alone increased the material sources of life of the landed nobility,
and consequently the power of the latter over the citizens--the
depressed position of Germany in the world market in general, whereby
the subsidies paid by foreigners to the princes became a chief source
of national income, the consequent dependence of the citizens upon the
Court, etc. etc.,--all these conditions, within which German society
and a political organization corresponding thereto developed, are
transformed by Heinzen's bluff common sense into a few pithy sayings,
the pith of which consists in the assertion that "German princedom"
made and daily remakes "German society."

The optimistic delusion which enables healthy