228. Then, too, there mingle with these voices the spirits of your more recent forefathers, those who fell in the holy war for the freedom of belief and of religion. " Save our honour too," they cry to you. " To us it was not entirely clear what we fought for; besides the lawful resolve not to let ourselves be dictated to by exter- nal force in matters of conscience, there was another and a higher spirit driving us, which never fully revealed itself to us. To you it is revealed, this spirit, if you have the power of vision in the spiritual world; it beholds you with eyes clear and sublime. The varied and confused mixture of sensuous and spiritual motives that has hitherto ruled the world shall be displaced, and spirit alone, pure and freed from all sensuous motives, shall take the helm of human affairs. It was in order that this spirit might have freedom to develop and grow to independent existence — it was for this that we poured forth our blood. It is for you to justify and give meaning to our sacrifice, by setting this spirit to fulfil its purpose and to rule the 266 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION world. If this does not come about as the final goal to which the whole previous development of our nation has been tending, then the battles we fought will turn out to be a vain and fleeting farce, and the freedom of conscience and of spirit that we won is a vain word, if from now onwards spirit and conscience are to be no more."
229. There comes a solemn appeal to you from your descendants not yet born. " You boast of your fore- fathers," they cry to you, " and link yourselves with pride to a noble line. Take care that the chain does not break off with you; see to it that we, too, may boast of you and use you as an unsullied link to connect ourselves with the same illustrious line. Do not force us to be ashamed of our descent from you as from base and slavish barbarians; do not compel us to conceal our origin, or to fabricate a strange one and to take a strange name, lest we be at once and without further examina- tion rejected and trodden underfoot. As the next generation that proceeds from you turns out to be, so will your reputation be in history; honourable, if they bear honourable witness for you, but disgraceful even beyond your due, if your descendants may not speak for you, and the conqueror makes your history. Never yet has a conqueror had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge to judge the conquered justly. The more he depreciates them, the more just does he himself stand out. Who can know what great deeds, what excellent institutions, what noble customs of many a people in the ancient world have fallen into oblivion, because their descendants were forced under the voke, while the conqueror wrote an account of them that suited his purpose, and there was none to contradict him! " 230. A solemn appeal comes to you even from foreign CONCLUSION 267 countries, in so far as they still understand themselves even to the slightest extent, and still have an eye for their true advantage. Yea, in all nations there are still some souls who cannot even yet believe that the great promises of a realm of justice, reason, and truth for the human race are vain and naught but a baseless delu- sion, and who, therefore, assume that the present age of iron is but a transition to a better state. These souls, and in them the whole of modern humanity, count upon you. A large part of modern humanity is descended from us, and the rest have received from us their religion and all their civilization. The former solemnly appeal to us by the soil of our common fatherland, which was their cradle, too, and which they have left free for us, the latter by the culture they have received from us as the pledge of a loftier bliss — both appeal to us to preserve ourselves for them too and for their sake, just as we have always been, and not to let the whole organism of the new race that has arisen be violently deprived of this member so important to it; so that, when they come to need our counsel, our example, and our co-operation in striving towards the true goal of earthly life, they will not miss us, to their pain.
231. All ages, all wise and good men who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and intuitions of something loftier, mingle with these voices and sur- round you and lift up imploring hands to you; even, if one may say so, providence and the divine plan in creat- ing a race of men, a plan which exists only to be thought out by men and to be brought by men into the actual world — the divine plan, I say, solemnly appeals to you to save its honour and its existence. Whether those were right who believed that mankind must always grow better, and that thoughts of a true order and worth of man 268 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION were no idle dreams, but the prophecy and pledge of the real world that is to be — whether they are to be proved right, or those who continue to slumber in an animal and vegetable existence and mock at every flight into higher worlds — to give a final and decisive judgment on this point is a work for you. The old world with its glory and its greatness, as well as its defects, has fallen by its own unworthiness and by the violence of your fathers. If there is truth in what has been expounded in these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its miseries. Do not console yourselves with an opinion based on thin air and depending on the mere recurrence of cases that have already happened; do not hope that when the old civilization has fallen a new one will arise once more out of a semi-barbarous nation on the ruins of the first. In ancient times there was such a people in existence, equipped with every requirement for such a destiny and quite well known to the civilized people, who have left us their description of it; and they themselves, if they had been able to imagine their own downfall, would have been able to discover in this people the means of recon- struction. To us also the whole surface of the globe is quite well known and all the peoples that dwell thereon. But do we know a people akin to the ancestral stock of the modern world, of whom we may have the same expectation? I think that everyone who does not merely base his hopes and beliefs on idle dreaming, but investi- gates thoroughly and thinks, will be bound to answer this question with a NO. There is, therefore, no way out; CONCLUSION 269 if you go under, all humanity goes under with you, with- out hope of any future restoration.
This it was, gentlemen, which at the end of these addresses I wanted and was bound to impress upon you, who to me are the representatives of the nation, and through you upon the whole nation.
Finis PRINTED LN GREAT BRITAIN BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH ilii li'Vii'iii' if