Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/16

2 In Germany Socialism with myriads of tiny teeth, is stealthily gnawing at the columns that uphold the structures of State and society, and nothing, not even the allurements of State and Christian Socialism, nor the countless traps set for it by the laws and the police, nor the state of siege in the capital, can disturb for a single instant, the secret, noiseless, untiring work of this insatiable subterranean destroyer. The Antisemitic movement was merely a convenient pretext for the gratification of passions which do not venture to show themselves under their true names—among the poor and ignorant it cloaked their hatred of property owners, among those who enjoy privileges inherited from mediæval times—among the aristocratic classes, it disguised their jealous fear of gifted rivals in the race for influence and power, and the romantic idealizing youth saw in it a means of satisfying a certain extravagant and false ideal of patriotism that longs not only for the political unity of the German Fatherland, but also for an ethnological unity of the German people. A secret longing that has been hinted at a thousand times but never fully explained, drives thousands upon thousands away from their homes to cross the ocean. The stream of emigrants pours forth from the German sea-ports like the life-stream from a deadly wound in the body of the nation, jet after jet, in constantly increasing volume, and the Government is powerless to arrest or control it. The political parties are waging a barbaric war of extermination upon each other; the prizes for which they are contending are the conditions of the Middle Ages and an absolute monarchy on one side, and on the other, the Nineteenth Century and the right of popular suffrage.

In Austria we see ten nationalities arrayed against each other, each seeking to injure the others by all the means at its command. In every state, even in every