Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/521

 more particularly among the unpropertied classes, with the fondest remembrance, as a national movement iniquitously put down by the strong hand of violence, it is the peasant wars.

Now, unmoved by this predilection and this shimmer of sentiment, with which the science and the popular sense have united in investing the peasant wars, I go on to divest these wars of this deceptive appearance and show them up in their true light,—that they were at bottom a reactionary movement, which, fortunately for the cause of liberty, was of necessity doomed to failure.

Further: If there exists in Germany an institution which, as a question of our own times, I abominate with all my heart as the source of our national decay, our shame and our impotence, it is the institution of the territorial State.

Now, the pamphlet in question is so strictly scientific end objective in its method, so far removed from all personal bias, that I therein go on to show that the institution of the territorial State was, in its time, historically a legitimate and revolutionary feature; that it was an ideal advance, in that it embodied and developed the concept of a State independent of relations of ownership; whereas the peasant wars sought to place the State, and all political power and standing, on the basis of property.

I then, further, go on to show how the period of feudalism is succeeded by a second world-historic period. I show how, while the peasant wars were revolutionary only in their own delusion, there begins almost simultaneously with them a real revolution, namely, that accumulation of capitalistic wealth which arose through the development of industry. This wrought a thoroughgoing change in the whole situation,—a change which reached its final act, achieved its legal acceptance, in the French Revolution of 1789, but which had in point of fact for three hundred years been imperceptibly advancing toward its consummation.

I show in detail, which I need not here expound or recapitulate, what are the economic factors that were destined to push landed property into the remotest