Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/145

 whole machine can compel the mainspring only in so far as the machine itself is compelled by the mainspring to compel it—that is to say, in so far as the mainspring only indirectly compels itself. But if it does not compel itself, and this is the defect we set out to remedy, no motion whatever results. If you suppose the second case, you confess that the source of all motion in your machine is a power that has not entered at all into your calculations and regulations, and is not in any way controlled by your mechanism. This power undoubtedly works as it can without your aid and according to its own laws, which are unknown to you. In each of the two cases, you must confess yourselves botchers and impotent boasters.

96. Now, people have felt this, and so they have wished, under this system which, in its reliance upon compulsion, need not concern itself about the other citizens, to educate at any rate the prince by every kind of good doctrine and instruction; for from the prince the whole movement of society proceeds. But how can one be sure of finding someone who by nature is capable of receiving the education that is to make a prince? Even if by a stroke of luck he were to be found, how can one be sure that he, whom no man can compel, will be ready and willing to submit to discipline? Such a view of the art of the State, whether it is found on foreign or German soil, is always a product of the foreign spirit. Here we may remark, to the honour of the German race and the German spirit, that, however good artists we might be in the mere theory of these calculations which are based on compulsion, none the less, when it came to putting them into practice, we were very much hampered by the dim feeling that things should not be done in this way; and so in this matter we remained behind foreign countries.