Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/293

 listen and learn just as we must, if you are to emerge from this state of natural ignorance. Your share in bringing about the fate that has befallen you together with your peoples has been stated here in the mildest and, we believe, the only just and equitable way; and unless you are willing to listen to flattery only, but never to the truth, you can have no complaint to make against these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, in the same way that all the rest of us wish that our share of the blame may be forgotten. For you too, as for all of us, a new life now begins. O, that this voice of mine might penetrate to you through the whole environment which is wont to make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it may say to you: you rule over peoples more loyal, more docile, more worthy of happiness than any princes have ever ruled over in any age or any nation. They have a sense of freedom and a capacity for it; but they followed you into a bloody war against what seemed to them freedom, because you willed it. Some among you willed otherwise later, and they followed you into what must have seemed to them a war of extirpation against one of the last remnants of German independence and autonomy, again because you willed it so. Since then they have been bearing and enduring the oppressive burden of our common woes; and they cease not to be loyal to you, to cleave to you with intense devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians. If you could only observe them without their knowing it; if you could only escape from that environment, which does not always present the loveliest aspect of humanity to you, and descend into the houses of the citizen and the cottages of the peasant, there to follow and reflect upon the quiet and secluded life of these classes of society, with whom the qualities of loyalty and uprightness, so rare now among the upper