Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/96

 he would, to begin with, not even obtain a clear and vivid sense-image such as was certainly obtained by a Roman of old. The latter saw every day with his own eyes the flexible politeness of an ambitious candidate to all and sundry, and outbursts of the slave mind too; and those words vividly re-presented these things to him. Even from the Roman of a later period these sights were removed by the change in the form of government and the introduction of Christianity; and, besides, his own language was beginning to a great extent to die away in his own mouth. This was more especially due to Christianity, which was alien to him, and which he could neither ward off nor thoroughly assimilate. How was it possible for this language, already half dead in its own home, to be transmitted alive to a foreign people? How could it now be transmitted to us Germans? Moreover, with regard to the symbolic mental content of both those expressions, there is in the word Popularity, even at the very beginning, something base, which was perverted in their mouths and became a virtue, owing to the corruption of the nation and of its constitution. The German never falls into this perversion, so long as it is put before him in his own language. But when Liberality is translated by saying that a man has not the soul of a slave, or, to give it a modern rendering, has not a lackey’s way of thinking, he once more replies that to say this also means very little.

Moreover, into these verbal images, which even in their pure form among the Romans arose at a low stage of ethical culture or designated something positively base, there were stealthily introduced during the development of the neo-Latin languages the idea of lack of seriousness about social relations, the idea of self-abandonment, and the idea of heartless laxity. In order to bring these