Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/46

 this demands undoubtedly no greater amount of energy than can reasonably be expected of our generation. To that promise I added another, namely, that so far as danger is concerned there is none at all in our proposal, because the self-interest of the power that rules over us demands that the carrying-out of such a proposal should be assisted rather than hindered. I consider it appropriate to speak my mind clearly on this point at once in this first address.

It is true that in ancient as in modern times the arts of corrupting and of morally degrading the conquered have very frequently been used with success as a means of ruling. By lying fictions, and by skilful confusion of ideas and of language, princes have been libelled to the people, and peoples to princes, in order that the two parties, because of their dissension, might the more surely be controlled. All the impulses of vanity and of self-interest have been cunningly aroused and fostered, so as to make the conquered contemptible, and thus to crush them with something like a good conscience. But it would be a fatal error to propose this method with us Germans. Apart from the tie of fear and hope, the coherence of that part of the outside world with which we have now come into contact is founded on the motives of honour and of national glory. The clear vision of the German, however, has long since come to the unshakable conviction that these are empty illusions, and that no injury or mutilation of the individual is healed by the glory of the whole nation, and we shall indeed, if a wider view of life be not brought before us, probably become dangerous preachers of this very natural and attractive doctrine. Without, therefore, taking to ourselves any new corruption, we are already in our natural condition a harmful prey; only by carrying out the proposal