Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/283

 beholds it. Turn back then to your own selves and see that it is you whom time will free from the errors of the preceding ages and from whose eyes it will remove the mist, if you permit it; that it is granted to you, as to no generation before you, to undo what has been done and to delete the discreditable intervening period from the pages of German history.

Review in your own minds the various conditions between which you now have to make a choice. If you continue in your dullness and helplessness, all the evils of serfdom are awaiting you; deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be driven and harried in every corner, because you are in the wrong and in the way everywhere; until, by the sacrifice of your nationality and your language, you have purchased for yourselves some subordinate and petty place, and until in this way you gradually die out as a people. If, on the other hand, you bestir yourselves and play the man, you will continue in a tolerable and honourable existence, and you will see growing up among and around you a generation that will be the promise for you and for the Germans of most illustrious renown. You will see in spirit the German name rising by means of this generation to be the most glorious among all peoples; you will see this nation the regenerator and re-creator of the world.

219. It depends on you whether you want to be the end, and to be the last of a generation unworthy of respect and certain to be despised by posterity even beyond its due—a generation of whose history (if, indeed, there can be any history in the barbarism that will then begin) your descendants will read the end with gladness, saying that its fate was just; or whether you want to be the beginning and the point of development for a new age glorious