Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/217

 ELEVENTH ADDRESS ON WHOM WILL THE CARRYING-OUT OF THIS SCHEME OF EDUCATION DEVOLVE?

163. scheme for the new German national education has been stated sufficiently for our purpose. The next question, which is now urgent, is this: who ought to place himself at the head to carry out this scheme, who is to be relied on, and on whom have we relied?

We have represented this education as the highest and, at present, the only urgent concern of German love of fatherland, and wish to make it first and foremost the means of bringing into the world the improvement and regeneration of the whole human race. But that love of fatherland ought above all to inspire the German State, wherever Germans are governed, and take the lead, and be the motive power in all its decisions. It is the State, therefore, to which we shall first of all have to turn our expectant gaze.

Will it realize our hopes? After what has already been said, what can we expect of it, looking, as is always understood, at no particular State, but at Germany as a whole?

164. In modern Europe education actually originated, not with the State, but with that power from which States, too, for the most part obtained their power—from the heavenly spiritual kingdom of the Church.