Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/255

 more profitable for the advancement of Culture the less such a State is favoured by accident, and the more it on that account requires, and continues to require, the exercise of the sagacious policy of increasing and strengthening its internal resources. A State which has yet anxiously to struggle for the maintenance of Equilibrium must be deficient in internal Freedom and Independence, and in all its proceedings must be too frequently under the necessity of taking into consideration the purposes of neighbouring States. A State which feels itself in possession of secure and undisputed Superiority easily becomes careless; surrounded by enterprising competitors it gradually loses its superiority; and it may perhaps require the discipline of grievous disasters to bring it back to the care of its own interests.

In these collective peculiarities of our Age lies the guarantee which Nature herself has given us for the continued excellence of our Governments, and the compulsion which, without our assistance, she exercises for our advantage over the constraining powers of Government.

Throughout Christian Europe almost every independent State now pursues its purpose with all the energy it possesses, and the means both of internal and external aggrandizement are not unknown. In this general struggle of Powers, it is necessary that no advantage should be allowed to escape, for in that case some neighbour would surely seize upon it at once, and besides depriving us of it would assuredly employ it against us;—that no single maxim of good Government, and no possible branch of Administration should be overlooked, for it is also a maxim of our neighbour to take every possible advantage of our neglect. In this contest that State which does not move onwards falls behind, and declines more and more, until at length it loses its Political Independence altogether, becomes in the first place a mere make-weight to some other State in the general Balance of Power, and is ultimately broken up into