Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 2/Chapter 2
2. The State
Even in 1920–21 the present outworn bourgeois world kept reproaching our young movement with the statement that our attitude toward the present State was a hostile one, when party bandits of all tendencies deduced a justification for attempting by every means to suppress the young and unpleasant herald of a world-concept. In the process they intentionally forgot that the present-day bourgeois world itself no longer had any uniform conception of the idea of a state, that there is no uniform definition for it, and can be none. After all, those who do the explaining are often employed at our institutions of higher learning as teachers of civil law, whose highest duty it is to find explanations and interpretations for the more or less happy momentary condition of the source of their bread and butter. The more impossible a state’s make-up, the more imperishable, artificial and unintelligible are the definitions of the purpose of its existence. What, for instance, was an Imperial-Royal University professor to write about the meaning and purpose of the state in a country whose state existence embodied probably the greatest monstrosity of the twentieth century? This was a difficult task, when we remember that the present-day teacher of civil law has less an obligation to be truthful than a compulsion to serve a definite purpose. This purpose is the preservation at any price of some particular one of those monstrosities of human mechanism now called states. There is therefore no need to be surprised if in the discussion of this problem realistic considerations are avoided as much as possible, in favor of a jumble of “ethical,” “moral,” and other intellectual values, tasks and aims.
In general we can distinguish three approaches:
A. The group who see in the state simply a more or less voluntary association of human beings under a governing power.
This group is the largest. In its ranks we find particularly the worshipers of our present-day principle of legitimacy, in whose eyes man’s will plays no part in the whole affair. To them the fact of a state’s existence in itself makes it sacredly inviolable. To protect this madness of human brains they require an absolutely dog-like worship of so-called state authority. In such people’s heads the means is turned in the twinkling of an eye into the ultimate end. The state is no longer there to serve men; the men are there to worship a state authority which embodies the ultimate and somehow official spirit. So that this condition of silent, ecstatic worship shall not be transformed into one of disorder, the state authority itself exists only to maintain peace and good order. It too is no longer either a means or an end. The state authority must look out for peace and good order, and peace and good order in turn must make possible the existence of the state authority. Between these two poles all of life must revolve.
In Bavaria this approach is represented primarily by the statecraftsmen of the Bavarian Center, called the “Bavarian People’s Party”; in Austria it used to be the black-and-gold Legitimists, in the Reich itself it is often unfortunately the so-called conservative element whose conception of the state follows this path.
B. The second group of men is somewhat smaller in number, since we must include in it those who at least attach a few qualifications to the existence of a state. They wish not only a uniform administration, but also if possible a uniform language—if only from general administrative considerations. The state authority is no longer the sole and exclusive purpose of the state; the welfare of the subjects is also included. Ideas of “freedom,” mostly misunderstandings, intrude themselves into these circles’ conception of a state. The form of government no longer appears inviolable by virtue of the simple fact of existing, but is tested for is expediency. The sanctity of old age does not protect against the criticism of the present. Beyond that, this conception expects of the state primarily the advantageous arrangement of the individual’s economic life, and therefore judges by practical considerations and from the standpoint of general economic productivity. We find supporters of this view among our ordinary German bourgeoisie, particularly the members of our liberal democracy.
C. The third group is numerically the weakest.
It sees the state as a means for the realization of the tendencies toward power politics (mostly very vaguely imagined) of the people belonging to a state defined and unified by language. The desire for a uniform state language arises not only from the hope of thus giving the state a foundation to support increase in outward strength, but from the opinions—completely mistaken, incidentally—that this will allow nationalization to be carried out in one particular direction.
In the last hundred years it has been a true calamity to watch the playing with the word “Germanize” in those circles, often in absolute good faith. I myself can still remember how in my youth this particular term led to quite incredibly mistaken notions. Even in Pan-German circles at that time one heard the opinion that Austrian Germanity with the assistance of the government might well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs; they never realized for a moment that Germanization can be applied only to the soil, never to people. What was generally understood by this word was a forced outward acceptance of the German language. But it is an almost inconceivable error to believe that, let us say, a negro or a Chinese becomes a Teuton because he learns German and is ready to speak the German language in the future, and perhaps to give his vote to a German political party.
The fact that any such Germanization is in reality a de-Germanization never became clear to our bourgeois nationalist world. For if the forcible imposition of a common language today bridges and finally wipes out previously conspicuous differences between various peoples, this is the beginning of bastardization, and thus in our case not a Germanization but a destruction of the Germanic element. It has happened all too often in history that a conquering people succeeds by forcible outward means in imposing its language on the conquered, but that a thousand years later its language has been spoken by a different people, and the victors have thus really been the vanquished.
Nationality, or rather race, is not in language but in blood, and so it could be possible to speak of Germanization only if this process succeeded in transforming the blood of the inferior. But this is impossible. A mingling of blood might produce a change, but it would mean the depression of the level of the superior race. The final result of such a process, that is, would be the destruction of those very qualities which once made victory possible for the conquering people. Cultural powers in particular would disappear on mating with a lower race, even though the resulting mongrels spoke the language of the former superior race a thousand times over. For a time there will still be some struggle between the differing spirits; it may be that the declining people, in a sort of last spurt, produces surprising cultural assets. But these are only single elements belonging to the higher race, or bastards of the first generation in whom the better blood still predominates and strives to break through; they are never the ultimate products of the mixture. These will always exhibit a culturally retrogressive motion.
It must be regarded today as fortunate that the Germanization of Austria in the sense of Joseph II never took place. Its result would probably have been the survival of the Austrian State, but also a lowering of the racial level of the German nation produced by the community of language. In the course of centuries a certain herd instinct would probably have crystallized, but the herd itself would have been inferior. A people constituting a state might have been born, but a civilizing people would have been lost.
It was better for the German nation that this process of mixing remained unaccomplished, even though it was not due to any noble insight, but to the narrow short-sightedness of the Hapsburgs. Had it been otherwise, the German people today could scarcely be described as a cultural factor any longer.
Not only in Austria, however, but in Germany itself so-called Nationalist circles were and are influenced by similar false reasoning. The oft-demanded policy of Germanizing the Polish East unfortunately almost always rested on the same fallacy. Here, too, they believed the Polish element could be Germanized by a purely linguistic process of Teutonization. Here too the result would have been disastrous—a people of alien race expressing its alien thoughts in the German language, comprising the exaltation and dignity of our nationality by its own inferiority.
How terrible even now is the damage done to our Germanity indirectly by the fact that when Jewry, chattering German, sets its foot on American soil it is laid to the charge of us Germans, owing to the ignorance of many Americans. But after all, no one would think of regarding the purely external fact that most of this verminous migration from the East speaks German as a proof of their German origin and nationality.
Historically, the thing usefully Germanized has been the soil that our forefathers conquered with the sword, and settled with German peasants. In so far as they introduced alien blood into the body of our people they assisted in that pernicious disjunction which takes effect in German hyper-individualism—a quality unfortunately often actually praised.
Even in this third group the state is still considered in a way an end in itself, and hence the preservation of the state the highest duty of human existence.
Summing up, we may say: None of these views have their deepest roots in the realization that the powers which create culture and substance depend fundamentally on racial elements, and that therefore the state’s highest task is the preservation and improvement of the race, that basic essential of all human cultural development. The ultimate conclusions from these false conceptions and views on the nature and purpose of a state were drawn by the Jew, Marx. In dissociating the state concept from racial obligations, without arriving at any other uniformly recognized formulation, the bourgeoisie smoothed the past for a doctrine which negated the state as such.
Even here the struggle of the bourgeois world against the Marxist International is bound to be a failure from the outset. It has already long since sacrificed the foundations which would be necessary to support its own ideology. The wily adversary, recognizing the weaknesses of its own structure, is rushing to the assault with weapons furnished, even if unintentionally, by itself.
It is therefore the first duty of a new movement resting on the ground of a populist world-concept to make sure that the conception of the nature and the meaning of the state takes on a clear and unified form.
The basic conclusion, then, is that the state is not an end, but a means. It is indeed indispensable to the formation of a higher human civilization, but it is not the cause. The latter consists exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture. There might be hundreds of model states on earth, but if the Aryan bearer of civilization were to die out no culture would exist that would correspond with the intellectual level of the most advanced peoples of today. We may go further, and say that the fact of the formation of human states by no means excludes the possibility of the destruction of the human race if superior intellectual ability and elasticity, are lost, owing to the disappearance of their racial possessor.
If for instance the surface of the earth were distributed today by some tectonic event, and a new Himalaya range were to rise from the ocean, the civilization of mankind would be destroyed in one cruel catastrophe. No state would continue to exist, all the bonds of order would be dissolved, the documents of a thousand years’ development destroyed; all would be one great corpse-strewn field covered with water and mud. Yet if from this chaos of horror but a few men of a definite race capable of civilization had escaped, the earth would once more show signs of human, creative power, when calm was restored, even though it took a thousand years. Only the destruction of the last civilizing race and its individual members would permanently devastate the earth. Conversely we can see even from present-day examples that State structures in their tribal beginnings cannot protect their racial members from destruction if the latter are lacking in capacity. Just as certain species of great prehistoric animals were forced to give way to others, and altogether disappeared, so man must give way if he lacks a certain intellectual strength through which alone he can find the weapons necessary for his self-preservation.
The state does not in itself create a definite cultural level; it can only preserve the race which does so. Otherwise the state as such may go on existing evenly for centuries, while, as a result of a mixture of races which it has not prevented, the cultural capacity and the resulting general life-pattern of a people have long since suffered profound change. The present-day state, for instance, may still simulate existence as a formal mechanism for a considerable length of time, but the racial poisoning of our body politic produces a cultural decline which is already horribly apparent.
Thus the existence of a higher humanity depends not on the State, but on the nationality capable of creating it.
This capacity will basically always exist, needing only to be awakened into practical effectiveness by certain outward conditions. Culturally and creatively gifted nations, or rather races, have these abilities latent within them, even though at the moment unfavorable outward circumstances do not allow the exploitation of these proclivities. It is therefore an unbelievable outrage to represent the Teutons of pre-Christian times as “uncivilized,” as barbarians. This they never were. The harshness of their Northern home merely forced conditions on them that prevented the development of their creative powers. If they had come to the more favorable regions of the South, even though there had been no classical Antiquity, if they had found elementary mechanical assistance in the shape of lower races, their dormant capacity for creating civilization would have grown to magnificent flower, just as was the case with the Hellenes. But this innate culture-building power itself did not originate solely in the Northern climate. The Lapp brought to the South would have no more culture-building capacity than the Eskimo. No, this magnificent creative and formative capacity happened to be granted specially to the Aryan, whether he still bears it dormant within him or gives it to awakened life, according as favorable circumstances permit it or an inhospitable Nature prevents it.
Hence the following conclusion results:
The state is the means to an end. This end is the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and spiritually similar living creatures. This preservation itself includes, firstly, subsistence as a race, and thus permits the free development of all the powers slumbering within that race. Of these powers part will always be devoted primarily to the preservation of physical life, and only what remains goes to assist in further intellectual development. But as a matter of fact the one is always indispensable to the other.
States that do not serve this purpose are mistakes, nay monstrosities. The fact of their existence does not alter this, any more than the success of a crew of buccaneers can justify piracy.
We National Socialists, as the supporters of a new world-concept, must never take up our stand on the celebrated “basis of facts”—and of untrue ones at that. If we did, we would no longer be the supporters of a great new idea, but the slaves of the existing life.
We must make a sharp distinction between the State as a vessel and the race as its contents. This vessel has a purpose only so long as it can preserve and protect the contents; otherwise it is worthless.
Thus the highest purpose of the populist state is to care for the preservation of those racial elements which, as creators of culture, produce the beauty and dignity of a higher humanity. We as Aryans, that is, can imagine as a state only the living organism of a nationality, not merely assuring the preservation of this nationality but leading it to the highest freedom by continuing to develop its spiritual and intellectual capacities.
But what people mostly try to force upon us as a state today is but the misbegotten result of profound human error, with unspeakable suffering as its aftermath.
We National Socialists know that with this attitude we are revolutionaries in the modern world, and are branded as such. But our thinking and actions must not be determined by the applause or disapproval of our times, but by inescapable duty to a truth we have recognized. Then we may be sure that the deeper insight of posterity will not only understand our present actions, but will confirm and exalt them.
And from this we National Socialists deduce our standards for the evaluation of the state. This value will be relative from the standpoint of the individual nationality, absolute from that of humanity as such. In other words:
The merit of a state cannot be assessed by the cultural level or the importance of this state’s power in relation to the rest of the world, but only by the degree of merit of this insitution for the nationality in question.
A state may be described as a model of its kind if it not only accords with the vital needs of the nationality it represents, but by its own existence actually keeps this nationality alive, no matter what general culture importance may belong to the state structure in relation to the rest of the world. For it is not the task of the state to beget abilities, but merely to clear the road for those powers that exist. Conversely a state may be called bad, no matter how high its cultural level, if by its racial make-up it condemns the possessor of this culture to destruction. For practically it thus destroys the sine qua non for the survival of this culture, which is not of the state’s creating, but is the fruit of a culture-building nationality protected by its living unification as a state. As I said, the state is not substance but form. The particular cultural level of a people, therefore is no scale by which to measure the goodness of the state in which it lives. It is easy to understand that a culturally well-endowed people presents an appearance superior to that of a negro tribe; nevertheless the state organism of the former, judged by the way it performs its task, may be worse than that of the negro. Though the best state and the best form of state cannot bring out in a people capabilities that are not and never were there, a bad state is certainly able to kill originally existing abilities through the destruction of the culture-sustaining race—a destruction, that is, tolerated or even encouraged by the bad state. Consequently the merit of a state can primarily be judged only by its relative usefulness to a definite nationality, and not by its importance in the world at large.
This relative judgment can be formed quickly and well; a judgment of the absolute value is a matter of great difficulty, since absolute judgment is really determined not only by the state but even more by the merit and the high level of the nationality in question.
If, therefore, we speak of the higher mission of the state, we must never forget that the higher mission essentially belongs to the nationality, for which the state has simply to assure free development by the organic strength of its existence.
When we ask, therefore, how the state that we Germans need should be constituted, we must first have a clear idea of the kind of people it is to include and the purpose it is to serve.
Unfortunately our German nationality no longer has a unified racial core. Nor has the process of fusing the various original elements gone so far that we can speak of a new race’s being thus formed. On the contrary, the various poisonings of blood which have afflicted our body politic, especially since the Thirty Years’ War, have decomposed not only our blood but our soul. The open frontiers of our Fatherland, the contacts with non-Germanic alien bodies along these boundary districts, and particularly the continuous strong influx of alien blood into the interior of the Reich itself, being constantly renewed, allows no time for an absolute fusion. No new race comes from the brew; the racial elements remain side by side, with the result that particularly at those critical moments when any herd ordinarily assembles, the German people scatter to the four winds. The basic racial elements are variously distributed, not only territorially but in detail, within the same territory. Along with Nordics are Orientals, along with Orientals Dinarics, Occidentals along with both, and mixtures among them all. In one direction this has been very harmful; the German people lacks that sure herd instinct which is rooted in homogeneity of blood, and which protects nations from destruction particularly in moments of peril, inasmuch as all the small internal differences among such peoples usually disappear at once, and the united front of a homogeneous herd is turned to face the common enemy. The jumble of our still-unmixed, highly heterogeneous basic racial elements gives rise to what we call hyperindividualism. In peaceful times it may sometimes do good service, but taken all in all it has cheated us of world domination. If in its historical development the German people had possessed that herd unity which came to the assistance of other peoples, the German Empire today would probably be mistress of the globe. World history would have taken a different course, and no man can tell whether in this way the thing might not have happened which so many blind pacifists today hope to beg by whimpering and weeping; a peace—not supported on the palm-leaf fans of tearful pacifist mourning-women, but founded on the victorious sword of a lordly people that puts the world to work for a higher culture.
The fact of the non-existence of a nationality united by blood has brought us untold suffering. It gave Residences to many little German potentates, but deprived the German people of overlordship.
Our people suffers from this disunity even yet; but what has brought us misfortune in the past and present may be a blessing for the future. For harmful as it has been on the one hand that complete intermixture of our original racial elements did not take place, thus preventing the formation of a unified people, on the other hand it has been correspondingly fortunate in that at least part of our best blood has remained pure, escaping racial degeneration.
No doubt complete amalgamation of our racial elements would have produced a unified national body, but—as any crossing of races proves—it would have had a smaller cultural capacity than the highest of the component elements originally possessed. That is the fortunate aspect in the absence of complete intermingling; even today we have within our German national body a great stock of still-unmixed Nordic-Germanic human beings, which we may consider our most precious possession in the future. In the dark days of ignorance of all racial laws, when a man was thought simply a man, all being equally valued, realization of the varying merits of the individual elements may have been lacking. Today we know that a complete intermingling of the elements of our national body would indeed have given us unity, and might have brought us external power, but that the highest aim of humanity would have been unattainable, since the one mainstay whom Fate has obviously chosen for this achievement would have gone down in the unified people’s racial medley.
Today, however, from the standpoint of our new comprehension we must examine and make use of what was prevented by a kind Fate through no merit of our own.
Anyone who talks of a mission of the German people on earth must know that it can consist only in the formation of a State which sees as its highest task the preservation and advancement of the noblest surviving element of our nationality, indeed of all mankind.
Only thus does the State take on a high inner purpose. Compared to the ridiculous slogan of assuring peace and good order to permit quiet reciprocal sharping, the task of preserving and advancing a supreme humanity bestowed on this earth by the goodness of the Almighty seems a truly exalted mission.
An inanimate mechanism which claims the right to exist for its own sake alone must be formed into a living organism with the sole purpose of serving a higher idea.
The German Reich as a State must include all Germans, with the duty not only of gathering and preserving the most valuable racial elements among that people, but of raising them slowly and surely to a dominating position.
In place of a basically petrified state we shall have a period of battle. But as always and everywhere in the world, here too the saying will still hold, “rest not, rust not;” and, further, victory lies always with the attack. The greater the aims being fought for, and the less the understanding of the great masses at the moment, the more tremendous the success, judging by the experience of world history, and the greater the importance of this success if the goal has been rightly seen and the battle fought with unshakable tenacity.
True, it may be more reassuring for our present official steersmen of the State to work for the preservation of an existing condition than to fight for one yet to come. They will feel that it is much easier to see the State as a mechanism which exists simply to keep itself alive, while their lives in turn “belong to the State,” as they are in the habit of saying. As if anything originating in a nationality could logically serve any other purpose than that nationality, or man could work for anything except man! It is naturally easier, as aforesaid, to see the State authority as merely the formal mechanism of an organization than to regard it as the sovereign embodiment of the self-preservative instinct of a nationality on this earth. For in the one case, to these weak minds, the State and State authority are the end in themselves, whereas in the other they are but a mighty weapon in the service of the great eternal fight for life, a weapon to which everyone must submit because it is not formal and mechanical, but is the expression of a common will for the conservation of life.
In the struggle for our new conception, according perfectly with the original meaning of things, we shall find but few fighting allies in a society which is antiquated physically, and all too often spiritually as well. Only the exceptions, old men with young hearts and fresh spirits, will come to us from those classes, but never those who see the final meaning of their life-work in the preservation of an existing condition.
Opposing us is the endless army not so much of the deliberately bad as of the mentally lazy and indifferent, to say nothing of those who have an interest in the preservation of the existing situation. But it is the very apparent hopelessness of our tremendous struggle which makes our task grand and offers a chance of success. The war-cry that frightens away or soon discourages small spirits is the assembly-signal for true warrior natures. And one thing we must get through our heads: If a certain total of a people’s energy and vigor seems to be concentrated on one goal, and thus is definitely removed from the inertia of the broad masses, these few per cent rise to be overlords of all. World history is made by minorities, if this numerical minority embodies a majority of will and determination.
What to many people may seem an obstacle today is in reality the first essential for our victory. The very magnitude and the difficulties of our task offer the probability that only the best warriors will join in the battle. And this very winnowing is a guarantee of success.
In general Nature herself makes certain corrective decisions in the question of the racial purity of living mundane beings. She has but little love for bastards. Particularly the early products of such cross breeding, let us say in the third, fourth and fifth generation, suffer bitterly for it. Not only are they deprived of the importance of the originally highest element in the mixture, but along with homogeneity of blood they have lost also the singleness of will and determination necessary to live at all. At critical moments, when the racially homogeneous being makes sound and single-minded decisions, the racially heterageneous one grows uncertain, or arrives at half-measures. It means not only a certain inferiority of the racially heterogeneous as against the racially homogeneous, but in practice also the possibility of a quicker decline. In countless cases where the race stands up, the bastard breaks down. There we see the compensation of Nature. But often she goes yet further. She restricts the possibility of further propagation. Thus she prevents the fecundity of further cross-breeds, and so causes them to die out.
If for instance an individual member of a given race were to enter into a relation with one racially inferior, the immediate result would be the lowering of the level in itself; but more than this, a weakening of the progeny as against racially pure neighbors. With the complete prevention of further blood coming from the higher race, the bastards, constantly interbreeding, either would die out as a result of Nature’s wise reduction of their vitality, or in the course of many thousand years would form a new mixture, in which the original individual elements, a thousand times crossed, would completely intermingle and thus no longer be recognizable. This would mean the formation of a new nationality with a certain herd vitality, but of considerably less intellectual and cultural importance in comparison with the higher race that took part in the original cross-breeding. But even in the latter case the mongrel product would be defeated in the struggle for existence so long as a higher and unmixed racial unit still existed as an adversary. All the herd-like unity which this new national body had built up in the course of a thousand years would still not be enough (in view of the general lowering of the racial level and the consequent decrease in spiritual elasticity and creative capacity) to carry through to victory the struggle with an equally united but intellectually and culturally superior race.
We can therefore state the following thesis:
Any crossing of races will sooner or later lead perforce to the downfall of the mixed offspring, so long as the superior element in this crossing still exists in any pure racial unit. The danger to the mixed progeny is eliminated only by the bastardization of the last racially pure superior individual.
This is the beginning of a process of natural regeneration, if a slow one, which gradually clears up racial poisoning once more, so long as a basis of racially pure elements remains, and there is no further bastardization.
This sort of process may take place of its own accord among creatures with a strong racial instinct, which have merely been driven from the path of normal, racially pure reproduction by special circumstances or some particular compulsion. When this pressure ceases, the part that remains pure will once more immediately strive to mate with its equal, thus putting a stop to further intermingling. The bastardized offspring move into the background once more of their own accord, except in a case where their number may already have increased so infinitely that any serious resistance on the part of the racially pure survivors is out of the question.
But the man who has lost his instincts and does not recognize the obligation laid upon him by Nature, can ordinarily hope for no such compensatory action on Nature’s part until he makes good his lost instincts by clear-eyed perception; this is then charged with the task of making the necessary reparation. But there is great danger that once the man has gone blind he will tear down the racial barriers more and more, until finally the last remnant of his best part is lost. Then indeed there would be nothing left but a monotonous mush such as is the ideal of our wonderful world-reformers today; but it would soon drive all ideals from the world. True, a great herd might be formed in that fashion, for a herd animal can be synthetically stirred together; but no such mixture can ever produce a man as a bearer of culture or as a cultural founder and creator. The mission of mankind could then be considered as at an end.
Anyone who does not wish the earth to approach that condition must be converted the comprehension that it is the task particularly of the Germanic State to be sure above everything that all further bastardization is stopped.
Our present generation of notorious weaklings, of course, will immediately yell, wail and complain of interference with the most sacred rights of man. No, there is only one most sacred right of man, and this right is also the most sacred duty: to take care that the blood is kept pure, thus preserving the best part of humanity and giving these beings the possibility of a more noble development.
A race-Nationalist state, therefore, will have first of all to raise marriage from the level of a constant racial polution, and to consecrate it as the institution appointed to beget images of the Lord, not monstrosities half-way between man and ape.
Protests against this on so-called humane grounds damnably ill become the age which on the one hand gives every degenerate the chance to reproduce, bringing untold suffering upon the offspring as well as upon their contemporaries, while on the other hand the means to prevent births by even the healthiest parents are offered for sale in every drugstore, and even by street peddlers. The supporters of our present State of peace and good order, our courageous bourgeois-nationalistic world, regard elimination of the opportunity for reproduction among syphilitics, tuberculars, the congenitally afflicted, cripples and cretins as a crime. The practical prevention of procreation among millions of the best persons, however, is not regarded as bad, and is no offense against the morals of this sanctimonious company, but is in effect serviceable to their short-sighted mental indolence. Otherwise they would still have at least to rack their brains about how to create the necessary conditions for the sustenance and preservation of those beings who, as healthy members of our nationality, will some day have to perform the same task for the coming generation.
How infinitely materialistic and ignoble is this whole system! People no longer strive to do their best for the race to come, but let things go as they will. Our Churches, too, sin against the Lord’s image, whose importance they are the first to emphasize; this is quite in line with their present activity, which keeps talking of the spirit, and lets its possessor, man, sink into a degenerate proletarian. And in face of this, people gape stupidly at the ineffectiveness of the Christian faith in their own country, at the horrible “Godlessness” of this physically botched and hence spiritually tattered pack of ragamuffins, and try to find recompense in the blessings of the Church among Hottentots and Zulus. While our European peoples, praise God, are falling into the condition of physical and moral outcasts, the pious missionary travels to Central Africa, and sets up negro missions so that our “higher culture” may turn healthy, if primitive and low-grade human beings into a corrupt brood of bastards even there.
It would accord far better with the spirit of this world’s noblest Man if, instead of annoying the negroes with missions that are neither desired nor understood, our two Christian Churches would teach Europe, kindly but seriously, that in the case of not wholly sound parents it is a work more pleasing to God to take pity on a healthy little poor orphan, giving him father and mother, than to bring into the world a sickly child of one’s own, which would only cause suffering and misery to itself and the rest of the world.
In this field the race-Nationalist state must make good what is being left undone in all directions. It must make race the central point of public life. It must take care that it is kept pure. It must establish the child as a people’s most precious possession. It must take care that only the healthy beget children; that there shall be but one thing shameful: to be sick and ailing, and nevertheless to bring children into the world; and one highest honor: to abstain. Conversely, however, it must be considered abhorrent to refuse healthy children to the nation. Here the state must play the part of defender of a thousand years’ future, compared to which the wish and the self-seeking of the individual are nothing, and must give way. It must press the latest advances in medicine into the service of this realization. It must declare and actually render incapable of procreation all those who are visibly sick and hereditarily tainted, and thus infectious in turn. Conversely it must take care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not restricted by the spendthrift financial management of a state regimé which makes the blessing of children a curse for parents. It must sweep away the lazy, nay criminal indifference with which people today treat the social requirements for a large family, and instead must feel itself the supreme protector of this greatest of a people’s blessings. Its solicitude must be devoted more to the child than to the adult.
He who is not sound and worthy in body and mind must not perpetuate his suffering in the body of his child. Here the racial state must do a stupendous work of education. And some day this work will appear as a greater deed than the most successful wars of our present bourgeois age. By education it must teach the individual that it is no shame, but merely a regrettable misfortune to be weakly and sick, but that it is a crime and thus also shameful to desecrate this misfortune by private egoism in loading it again upon innocent beings; but that by contrast it is a proof of the highest nobility of spirit and admirable humanity for a man innocently sick, to go without a child of his own, and to devote his love and tenderness to a young, poor, and obscure scion of our nationality whose health promises to make him some day a vigorous member of a vigorous community. In this work of education the state must provide the purely intellectual complement to its practical activity. It must act on that principle without regard for understanding or misunderstanding, approval or disapproval.
If the capacity and the opportunity for procreation were denied to physical degenerates and mental cases for but six hundred years, it would not only free humanity of an immeasurable misfortune, but would contribute to an improvement in health which today seems almost inconceivable. If the deliberate and systematic promotion of the fertility of the nationality’s healthiest members is thus realized, the result will be a race which, at least for the time being, will have got rid of the germs of our present physical, and hence also spiritual, decay.
For once a people and a state have traveled this road, attention will be directed of its own accord toward increasing the racially most valuable core of the people, and its fertility in particular, so that finally the entire nationality may share in the blessings of a high bred racial body.
The road to be taken is primarily this: that a state does not leave the settlement of newly acquired territories to chance, but subjects it to particular rules. Expressly established race commissions will fill out settlers’ permits for individuals; but these permits will be conditional upon definitely determined racial purity. Thus border colonies can gradually be formed whose population consists exclusively of possessors of the highest race purity, and thus of the highest racial ability. They are thus a precious national treasure for the totality of the people; their growth is bound to fill every individual member of the people with pride and joyful confidence. After all, in them are the seeds for the last great future development of his own people, nay of mankind.
The populist world-concept in a popular state must eventually succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which people’s chief care is no longer the improved breeding of dogs, horses and cats, but the exaltation of man himself; an age in which one man silently and understandingly abstains, while the other joyfully sacrifices and gives.
That this is possible cannot be denied in a world where hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands voluntarily impose celibacy on themselves under no compulsion or obligation except an ecclesiastical commandment.
Is the same surrender not to be possible when this is replaced by the admonition to put an end at last to the original sin of race poisoning, whose effects are unending, and to give to the Almighty Creator such beings as he himself made?
True, the pitiful army of our present-day bourgeois mediocrities will never understand this. They will laugh at it, or shrug their stooping shoulders, and groan out their perpetual excuse: “That would be all very nice, but it can’t be done!” With you indeed it cannot be done; your world is not suited to it. You know but one care—your personal life; and one God—your money! But we are not speaking to you; we are speaking to the great army of those who are too poor for their personal lives to mean the highest happiness in the world, to those who do not see gold, as the ruler of existence but believe in other gods. Above all else we are speaking to the mighty army of our German youth. It is growing up at a great turning-point of history, and its fathers’ sins of inertia and indifference will force it to fight. Some day German youth will either be the architect of a new racial state or it will be the last witness of the complete collapse, the end of the bourgeoisie world.
For when a generation suffers from mistakes which it sees and even admits, only to content itself, as our bourgeois world does today, with the cheap explanation that nothing can be done about it, that society is marked for extinction. But it is the characteristic feature of our bourgeois world that it can no longer even deny the evil. It is forced to admit that much is corrupt and bad, but it no longer has the determination to rise up against the evil, to gather the strength of a people of sixty or seventy millions with grim energy, and thus to make a stand against the menace.
On the contrary, if that is done elsewhere, there are silly carping comments, and people try at least to prove from a distance the theoretical impossibility of the process, and to declare any success unthinkable. No reason is too half-witted to serve as a prop for their own dwarfishness and their intellectual attitude. If, for instance, an entire continent at last declares war on the poison of alcohol, to free a people from the clutches of this devastating vice, our European bourgeois world has no answer but a blank stare and a shake of the head, which is particularly becoming to this most ridiculous of societies. But if everything fails, and the noble, sacrosanct, good old way is opposed somewhere in the world, and that with success, then, as aforesaid, at least the success must be doubted and depreciated, for which purpose they do not even hesitate to urge bourgeois-moral considerations against a struggle which is attempting to sweep away the greatest of immorality.
No, we must not fool ourselves—our present bourgeoisie is already worthless to mankind for any exalted task, simply because it is without quality, is too inferior; and it is too inferior less from intentional badness, if you like, than from an incredible indolence and everything that springs from it. And for that reason those political clubs which drift around under the general name of “bourgeois parties” have long since ceased to be anything but a community of interest of certain occupational groups and social classes, and their noblest aim is but to represent egoistic interests as well as possible. It is quite plain that this sort of political bourgeois guild is suited for anything but battle—particularly when the opposing side consists not of cautious shopkeepers but of proletarian masses that have been inflamed to the utmost and are determined to the bitter end.
If we recognize as the first task of the State in working for the welfare of this nationality the preservation, care and development of its best racial elements, it is natural that this solicitude must not stop short with the birth of the little new member of our people and race, but must train the young scion into a valuable member for subsequent further increase.
And just as in general the racial quality of the human material at hand is the first essential for intellectual capability, so in particular education must begin by considering and promoting bodily health; for taken by and large a sound, vigorous mind is to be found only in a sound and vigorous body. The fact that geniuses are often physically ill-formed, even sometimes diseased, is no proof to the contrary. These are exceptions which, as everywhere, only prove the rule. But if the masses of a people consist of physical degenerates, a really great mind will arise only very seldom from this bog. And in no case will its work be fated to have great success. The degraded riffraff either will not understand it at all, or their will will have been so weakened that they can no longer follow the soaring flight of such an eagle.
Realizing this, the populist state must direct its entire educational work primarily not toward pumping in mere knowledge, but toward training sound and healthy bodies. The development of the intellectual capacities takes only second place. But here again the development of character, particularly strength of will and determination, comes first, together with training for joy in responsibility, while academic schooling comes last of all.
The race-Nationalist state must go on the assumption that a man with little academic schooling, but physically sound, with a good, solid character, filled with determination and strong will, is more valuable to the people’s community than a brilliant weakling. A nation of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not conquer Heaven, nor even be able to assure their existence here on earth. In the fierce battle of Destiny the vanquished is seldom the one who knows least, but the one who draws the weakest conclusions from his knowledge, and transforms them most wretchedly into action. Even here there must be a certain harmony. A decayed body is not made one whit more aesthetic by a brilliant mind, and in fact the highest intellectual training could not be justified at all if its possessors were at the same time physically degenerate and crippled, weak-willed, wavering and cowardly in character. What makes the Greek ideal of beauty immortal is the marvelous pairing of magnificent bodily beauty with brilliant mind and noble soul.
If Moltke’s words are true: “Only the able man is lucky in the long run,” they must certainly hold for the relation between body and mind. The mind too, if it is healthy, will as a rule and in the long run dwell only in a sound body.
Hence physical training in the race-Nationalist state is not the affair of the individual, nor is it a matter which primarily concerns parents, and which is of public interest only in second or third place; it is indispensable for the self-preservation of the nationality upheld and protected by the state. So far as purely scholastic training is concerned, even now the state interferes with the individual’s right of self-determination, and asserts the right of the community by compelling the child to go to school without asking whether the parents are willing or not; to an even greater degree the populist state in future will have to establish its authority as against the ignorance or the misunderstanding of the individual in questions of preserving the nationality. It must arrange its educational work in such fashion that even in earliest childhood the young bodies are suitably treated and hardened against the demands of later life. Above all it must take care not to rear a race of bookworms.
This work of care and training must begin with the young mother. Just as it was possible in the course of decades of careful work to attain antiseptic cleanliness in childbirth, and to reduce puerperal fever to a few cases, it must and will be possible by thorough training of nurses and of the mothers themselves to introduce a treatment of the child even in his earliest years that will be a splendid basis for later development.
In a race-Nationalist state the school itself must set aside far more time for physical training. It will not do to load down the young brains with ballast which experience shows they will retain but a fraction of, the more so because it is usually the unnecessary trivialities instead of the essentials that stick, because the young person is quite unable to make a reasonable selection from the material poured into him. Today the curriculum even of the secondary schools calls for a bare two hours a week of gymnastics, and even leaves attendance to the individual as an optional matter; compared to the purely intellectual training, this is a glaring disproportion. Not a day should pass in which the young person’s body is not schooled at least an hour each, morning and evening, and this in every sort of sport and gymnastics. One sport in particular must not be forgotten which a great many “populists” especially regard as rough and unworthy—boxing. The wrong opinions current in “cultivated” circles on the subject are quite incredible. For the young man to learn to fence and then to go around dueling is taken for granted, and considered honorable, but for him to box is thought rough. Why? No other sport is its equal in building up aggressiveness, demanding lightning-like decision, and training the body in steely agility. It is no rougher for two young people to fight out a difference of opinion with their fists than with a piece of sharpened iron. Nor is it more ignoble for a man on being attacked to resist his assailant with his fists than to run away, yelling for a policeman. But above all, the young healthy boy should learn to stand up under blows. Naturally our present-day intellectual warriors may regard this as wild. But it is not the purpose of a race-Nationalist state to breed a colony of peaceable aesthetes and physical degenerates. Its ideal is not the honest bourgeois mediocrity or the virtuous old maid, but the defiant embodiment of manly strength, and women who can bring other men into the world.
And sport exists by no means only to make the individual strong, agile and bold, but also to toughen and teach people to stand hard knocks.
If our whole intellectual upper class had not been brought up so exclusively by the refined teachings of propriety, and if instead they had all learned to box, a German Revolution of fancy-men, deserters and similar riffraff would never have been possible. For the Revolution owed its success not to the bold and courageous energy of the revolutionaries, but to the cowardly, miserable indecision of those who guided and were responsible for the State. But our entire intellectual leadership had been educated only “intellectually,” and was therefore bound to be defenseless the moment the adversary took to the crowbar instead of intellectual weapons. But the whole thing was possible only because our higher school system, in particular, seemed to train not men, but civil servants, engineers, technicians, chemists, lawyers, literati, and—lest such intellectuality should die out—professors.
Our intellectual leadership has always been brilliant in its achievements, whereas our leadership of will has mostly been beneath contempt.
Granted that no amount of training will make a fundamentally cowardly man courageous, it is equally certain that a man not without courage may be paralyzed in the development of his qualities if, owing to faults in his education, he is inferior in strength and agility from the outset. How greatly a conviction of physical excellence increases a man’s courage, and even awakens his aggressiveness, we can judge best of all from the army. The men were not all heroes here, any more than anywhere else; they were the great average. But the superior training of the German soldier in peace-time innoculated the whole gigantic organism with that hypnotic faith in its own superiority to a degree its foes had not thought possible. For the immortal spirit and courage in the attack of the onrushing German army in the summer and fall of 1914 were solely the result of the tireless training in the long, long years of peace which got the most incredible performances out of often feeble bodies, and thus produced that self-confidence which was not lost even in the horror of the greatest battles.
Our German people in particular, lying crushed today, exposed to the kicks of the world, needs the hypnotic strength inherent in self-confidence. But this self-confidence must be trained into the young members of our people from childhood. His whole education and training must be planned to give him the conviction that he is absolutely superior to others. Through his physical strength and agility he must regain his faith in the invincibility of his whole nationality. For what once led the German army to victory was the sum total of the confidence which each individual felt in himself, and all together in their leadership. The thing that will set the German people on its feet again is the conviction of the possibility of reconquering its freedom. But this conviction can only represent the grand total of the similar feelings of millions of individuals.
Here too we must not be deceived:
The collapse of our people was monstrous, and equally monstrous must be the exertion in order to bring this distress to an end some day. Anyone who believes that our people can get from our present bourgeois education for peace and good order the strength to shatter the present structure of the world, which means our destruction, and to hurl the broken chains of our slavery in the faces of our enemies, is bitterly mistaken. Only an extra measure of national will-power, thirst for freedom, and utmost passion can make good what we have lacked.
Even the clothing of youth must be suited to this purpose. It is sad to see how even our young people are already subject to a fashion-madness which does its share to turn the old saying, “Clothes make the man,” into a disastrous one.
Youth is the very time when clothing must be put to work for education. The boy who goes around in the summer with long trousers, and muffled up to the neck, loses precisely by his clothing one motive for his physical development. Ambition and, we need not hesitate to admit, vanity must be turned to account. Not vanity of fine clothes which not everyone can buy, but vanity of a beautiful, well-formed body, which everyone can help to create.
This is expedient, too, for later purposes. The girl should come to know her knight. If physical beauty were not completely pushed into the background by our foppish world of fashion, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bowlegged, disgusting Jew bastards would be quite impossible. And it is also to the interest of the nation that the most beautiful bodies should find one another, and thus help to give new beauty to the nationality.
Today this is more necessary than ever, because military training is lacking, and thus the one institution that used at least partly to compensate in peace times for what the rest of our education failed to do is gone. And there too the success lay not only in the development of the individual as such, but in its influence on the relations of the sexes. The young girl prefers the soldier to the non-soldier.
The racial state must not only carry through and supervise physical education during the official school years, but must also take care after school is finished that, so long as a boy is still developing physically, this development turns out to his benefit. It is nonsense to think that the state’s right to supervise its young citizens terminates with the end of school life, to commence existence again suddenly during military service. This right is a duty, and as such always exists in equal measure. The present-day State, which takes no interest in healthy people, has criminally neglected its duty. It lets the young people of today go to damnation on the streets and in brothels instead of reining them in, and continuing their physical development until some day a healthy man and a healthy woman are the result.
For the present it is a matter of indifference in what form the state continues this training; the important thing is that it shall do so, and shall find the ways that serve the purpose. The populist state will have to regard both the intellectual training and the physical development of post-school years as the state’s job, and to carry them out through state institutions. At the same time, in broad outline, this education can be the preliminary training for later army service. The army ought no longer to have to teach the young man the basic ideas of the simplest drill manual, nor will it still receive recruits in the present sense; it ought simply to turn the already trained young man into a soldier.
In the racial state, that is, the army will no longer teach the individual how to stand and to walk, but is to be considered the final and highest school of training for the Fatherland. The young recruit in the army will receive the necessary training at arms, but he must also be further molded for the rest of his later life. The crowning point of military training must be one which was the greatest merit of the old army: in this school the boy is to be turned into a man; and in this school he must not only learn to obey, but through this must gain the equipment which later will enable him to command. He must learn to be silent, not only when he is justly blamed, but he must learn if necessary to suffer injustice in silence.
Further, fortified by faith in his own strength, carried away by the intensity of the common esprit de corps, he must become convinced of the invincibility of his nationality.
When he has finished his army service, he is to be given two documents: his diploma of state citizenship, a legal document which permits him to enter on public life, and his health certificate, proving physical soundness for marriage.
The racial state can also carry on the education of the girl on the same principles as that of the boy.
Here too the main emphasis must be placed above all on physical culture, secondly on the development of spiritual, and lastly on intellectual, values. The unshakable aim of female education must be the coming mother.
Only as its second consideration must the racial state foster character-building in every way.
Of course the most essential qualities of character exist from the beginning in the individual person; the man of egoistical proclivities will always remain so, just as the idealist at bottom will always be an idealist. But in between the absolutely pronounced characters there are, after all, millions who seem vague and indistinct. The born criminal will always be a criminal; but many people who have merely a certain criminal inclination can still become valuable members of society through proper education; while conversely bad training may produce really bad elements out of wavering characters.
How many were the complaints during the war that our people was so little able to hold its tongue! How hard this made it to keep even important secrets from the knowledge of the enemy! But we must ask ourselves this question: what did German education before the war do to train the individual to silence? Even in school, was not the little tattletale unfortunately often preferred to his more discreet comrades? Was not (and is not still) tale-bearing regarded as praiseworthy “frankness,” and silence as shameful obstinacy? Did anyone make any effort to represent silence as a manly virtue? No; for in the eyes of our present-day schooltraining these are trifles. But these trifles cost the State uncounted millions in judicial expense, for ninety per cent of all suits for slander and the like are caused solely by lack of discretion. Irresponsible statements are blabbed irresponsibly about, our economic life is constantly injured by the wanton revealing of important manufacturing methods, etc., and even all the secret preparations for national defense are rendered illusory, simply because the people has not learned to hold its tongue, but talks about everything. In war this garrulity may lead to the loss of battles, and thus contribute measurably to the disastrous outcome of the struggle. Here as elsewhere we must realize that what youth does not practice, age cannot do. That is why on principle the teacher must not try to find out about silly boyish pranks by encouraging vile tale-bearing. Youth has a state of its own, and faces the adult with a certain unified solidarity; and this is perfectly natural. The bonds between the ten-year-old and his comrade of the same age are stronger and more natural than those with adults. A boy who tells on his comrades is committing treachery, and thus giving play to a disposition which (brusquely expressed and transferred to a larger scale) corresponds exactly to that of high treason. Such a boy can by no means be regarded as a “good, well-behaved” child, but as a boy with very indifferent qualities of character. It may be convenient for the teacher to increase his authority by making use of such failings, but the seeds of a spirit which may later have disastrous effects are thus sown in the youthfull heart. It has happened more than once that a little tattletale has grown up into a great scoundrel.
This is but one example in place of many. The deliberate development of good, noble qualities of character in the schools today is nil. In future a very different emphasis must be placed on this. Faithfulness, self-sacrifice, silence are virtues which a great people needs, and whose development and inculcation in the schools is more important than much of what fills the curriculum at present. The breaking of the habit of tearful complaint, of howling when hurt, etc., comes under this head. If an educational system forgets to begin with the child in teaching that even pain and hard knocks must be supported in silence, it must not be surprised if at some later crucial moment, for instance when the man is at the front, the entire postal service is devoted exclusively to the transportation back and forth of whimpering and wailing letters. If there had been a little less knowledge poured down the throats of our children in primary school, and more self-control, it would have been amply rewarded from 1915 to 1918.
In its educational work, then, the race-Nationalist state must attach every importance to character-development along with physical development. Many moral ailments in our present body politic can be greatly lessened, if not altogether eliminated, by education on this principle.
The development of strength of will and resolution, as well as the cultivation of willingness to assume responsibility, is of utmost importance.
It used to be a principle in the army that a command is always better than none; with young people this ought to be, An answer is always better than none. Not to answer for fear of saying the wrong thing ought to be more embarrassing than an incorrect answer. Starting from this primitive basis youth must be trained to have the courage to act.
The fact has often been bewailed that in November and December of 1918 every single person in authority was a failure, and that from the Monarch on down to the last divisional commander no one had the strength to make an independent decision. This terrible fact is the handwriting on the wall for our education; the cruel catastrophe was the expression on an enormous scale of what already existed on a small scale. It is this lack of will, and not a lack of arms, which makes us incapable of any serious resistance today. It affects our whole people, and blocks every decision involving any risk, just as if the greatness of a deed did not consist precisely in its daring. Without knowing it, a German general succeeded in finding the classical formula for this pitiful lack of will-power: “I act only when I can count on a fifty-one per cent probability of success.” In this “fifty-one per cent” is the tragedy of the German collapse; he who demands of Fate the assurance of his success automatically surrenders the importance of a heroic deed. For this consists in the fact, that, being convinced of its deadly danger, one takes the step which may bring success.
A victim of cancer whose death will otherwise be certain does not need to figure fifty-one per cent in order to risk an operation. And even if this offers one-half of one per cent probability of a cure, a courageous man will dare it; if he does not, he will not whimper for his life.
But, taken all in all, our present disease of cowardly indecision and lack of will results chiefly from our basically mistaken education of youth, whose devastating effect continues into later life, finding its conclusion and its crowning form in the leading statesmen’s lack of moral courage.
In line with this is the cowardice in the face of responsibility which rages today. Here too the mistake goes back to the education of youth, impregnates all of public life, and is immortally perfected in the institution of parliamentary government.
Even in school people unfortunately attach more importance to “contrite” confessions and the “crushed for swearing” of the little sinner than to candid admission. In fact, to many a popular educator of today, the latter even seems the most visible sign of incorrigible delinquency, and—incredible though it be—an end on the gallows is prophesied for many a boy because of qualities which would be of inestimable value if they were the common property of an entire people.
The race-Nationalist state of the future must concentrate on training the will and the power of decision, and from babyhood it must implant readiness for responsibility and the courage for confession in the hearts of youth. Only if it recognizes this necessity in its whole significance will it obtain, as the result of centuries of education, a national body no longer subject to those weaknesses which so disastrously contributed to our present collapse.
Academic school training, which today is the be-all and end-all of the State’s entire educational work, can be taken over by the populist state with but slight changes. These changes are in three fields.
In the first place, the childish brain must in general not be burdened with things ninety-five per cent of which it does not need, and which it therefore forgets. The curriculum of primary and grammar schools, in particular, is a hybrid affair. In many of the individual subjects the material to be learned has increased to such an extent that only a fraction of it sticks in the individual’s head, and only a fraction of this abundance can be used, while on the other hand it is not enough for the purpose of a man working and earning his living in a certain field. Take for instance the ordinary civil servant who has graduated from secondary school or from the upper realschule, when he is thirty-five or forty, and test the school learning which he once so painfully acquired. How little of all the stuff that was then drummed into him still remains! One will, indeed, be answered: “Yes, but the object of the amount that was learned was not simply to put a man in possession of a great deal of information later, but to train his power of intellectual absorption, and the thinking power, particularly the power of observation of the brain.” This is true in part. But still there is danger that the youthful brain may be drowned in a flood of impressions which it is very seldom able to master, and whose individual elements it can neither sift nor judge according to their greater or less importance; and on top of that, it is usually not the inessential but the essential which is forgotten and sacrificed. Thus the main object of learning so much is lost; for after all it cannot consist in making the brain able to learn by unmeasured piling-up of instruction, but in creating for later life a fund of knowledge which the individual needs, and which through him once more benefits society. But this purpose is illusory if such an excessive mass of material is thrust upon a person in his youth that later he retains either none of it or only the non-essentials. There is no visible reason why millions of persons in the course of years should have to learn two or three foreign languages which they can use in only a fraction of the cases, and therefore mostly quite forget again; for of a hundred thousand pupils who learn French, for instance, scarcely two thousand will have any serious use for this knowledge later, while ninety-eight thousand never in their whole lives have a chance in practice to use what they have learned. That is, in their childhood they spend thousands of hours on a thing which is without value or meaning to them later. Even the objection that this is part of a general education is false, because one could maintain this only if people retained throughout their lives the things they had learned. And so it is really for the benefit of two thousand people to whom the knowledge of the language is useful that ninety-eight thousand are plagued in vain, and sacrifice valuable time.
And at that the language in question is not one of which it can be said that it gives training in “logical thinking,” as is true, for instance, in Latin. It would therefore be considerably more expedient to present such a language to the young student only in its general outlines, or, to put it better, in a sketch of essentials, thus giving him a knowledge of the characteristic nature of the language, perhaps introducing him to the rudiments of grammar, and illustrating pronunciation, sentence structure, etc. by examples. This would be enough for ordinary needs, and, being easier to take in and to remember, would be more valuable than the usual cramming of the whole language, which is not really mastered even so, and is later forgotten. This would also avoid the danger that only a few chance, disconnected fragments of the overwhelming abundance of materials would stick in memory, since the young person would be given only the most noteworthy parts to learn, and the sifting according to importance would have been done for him.
The general grounding thus given would be quite enough for most people, even for later life, while it would give anyone who really needed the language later the opportunity to build up on it, and by his own choice to work on it and learn it thoroughly.
This would gain the necessary time in the schedule for physical culture and for the increased requirements in the fields already mentioned.
In particular there must be a change in previous methods of instruction in the teaching of history. Hardly any people has more to learn from history than the Germans; but there is scarcely any people that makes a worse use of it. If politics is history in the making, our historical education is directed by the nature of our political activity. It will not do here either to pout over the miserable results of our political performances if we are not resolved to assure better training for politics. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases the result of our present-day history-teaching is pitiable. A few scraps, dates and names are usually what remains, while there is a total lack of any large, clear line. The essentials that really count are not taught at all; it is left to the more or less brilliant abilities of the individual to find the inner motive causes in the flood of information, in the sequence of events. We may resist this bitter realization as we will; but we have only to read attentively the speeches delivered by our parliamentarians on political problems, say questions of foreign policy, during a single session, remembering that this is (at least so it is claimed) the flower of the German nation, and that in any case a great part of these people wore out the benches of our secondary schools, some even of institutions of higher learning, and we shall see how totally inadequate the historical education of these people is. If they had never studied history at all, but simply had a sound instinct, it would be a good deal better and more useful to the nation.
Particularly in the teaching of history the amount of material must be cut down. The chief value is in grasping the great lines of development. The more the teaching is limited to this, the more hope there is that the individual’s knowledge will later bring in a profit that, added up, will in turn benefit the community. For we do not learn history simply in order to know what has been; we learn history so that it may be our preceptor for the future and for the survival of our own nationality. This is the purpose, and historical instruction is only a means toward it. But even here the means today has become the end, and the end no longer exists. Let no one say that a thorough study of history requires consideration of all these individual bits of information as they alone make it possible to determine the broad outlines. To determine these is the task of specialized scholarship. The ordinary average man is no professor of history. For him history exists primarily to give him that measure of historical insight which he needs in order to make up his mind about the political affairs of his nationality. Anyone who wishes to become a history professor may give the subject profound study later. Naturally he will have to concern himself with every detail, even the smallest. But for that even our present-day historical instruction is not enough; it is too extensive for the ordinary average man, but far too limited for the scholar.
It is also the task of a populist state to take care that a world history shall be written at last in which the race question is elevated to the dominating position.
Summing up: the populist state will have to put general scholastic instruction into a shortened form, including the very essentials. Outside of that, opportunity must be offered for thorough, specialized scholarly training. It is enough if the individual person is given a store of general knowledge in broad outline, receiving a thorough detailed and specialized training only in the field which will be his in later life. General training should be obligatory here in all fields, while specialization should be left to the choice of the individual.
The shortening of the schedule and of the number of classes thus attained would be used for the benefit of the development of the body, the character, of will and resolution.
How unimportant our present-day school instruction, particularly in the secondary schools, is for a subsequent life work, is best shown by the fact that people may arrive in the same situation from three altogether different sorts of schools. The fact is that general cultivation, and not the special knowledge that has been poured in, is what counts. And where real special knowledge is necessary, as aforesaid, of course it cannot be obtained within the curriculum of our present-day secondary schools.
This sort of half-measures the populist state must therefore some day clear away.
The populist state’s second change in the scholastic program must be the following:
It lies in the nature of our present materialistic age that scholastic training turns more and more toward subjects of pure science, that is toward mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. Necessary as this is for an age in which technology and chemistry are kings, at least outwardly the most obvious characteristics of daily life, it is equally dangerous for the general education of a nation to be aimed ever more exclusively in their direction. This education, on the contrary, must always be idealistic. It should be adapted more to humanistic studies, offering only the rudiments in preparation for later specialization. Otherwise we shall be sacrificing powers that are more important for the preservation of the nation than any technical or other skill. Specifically, the study of Antiquity must not be left out of historical teaching. Roman history, properly grasped in broad outline, is the best of preceptors, not only for today but probably for all time. The wonderful beauty of the Hellenic cultural ideal, too, we must preserve. The differences of individual peoples must not be allowed to break down the greater community of race. The struggle raging today has a great goal: the culture that is fighting for its existence embodies thousands of years, and includes Greeks and Teutons together.
There should be a sharp distinction between general cultivation and specialized knowledge. As the latter threatens, especially today, to sink more and more into pure service of Mammon, general cultivation, at least so far as its more idealistic approach is concerned, must be preserved as a counter-weight. Here too the principle must be incessantly pounded in that industry and technology, trade and commerce can flourish only so long as an idealistically-minded national community provides the necessary conditions. These conditions are founded not on materialistic egoism, but on self-denying readiness for sacrifice.
On the whole the present education of youth has taken for its chief object to pump into the young person the knowledge he will need for his own advancement in later life. It is expressed this way: “The boy must be a useful member of human society.” But by this they mean his ability to earn his daily bread in a decent fashion. The superficial civic training that goes with it on the side is feeble from the outset. Since a state in itself is but a form, it is very hard to train people for it, let alone make them feel obligation toward it. A form is too easily broken. But the idea of a State, as we have seen, has no clear meaning. So there is nothing left but the ordinary “patriotic” education. In the old Germany its chief emphasis was on an often unwise, but usually very insipid glorification of petty potentates, whose number forced from the outset the abandonment of any comprehensive evaluation of our people’s truly great men. The result among our broad masses was a very deficient knowledge of German history. Here too the sweeping line was lacking.
It is perfectly obvious that in this fashion there was no arriving at any true nationalist enthusiasm. Our training lacked the skill to pick out a few names from the historical growth of our people, and to make them the universal property of the entire German people, thus holding the entire nation with a uniformly firm bond of uniform knowledge and uniform enthusiasm. They were not able to make the really important men of our people seem towering heroes in the eyes of the present day, to concentrate general attention upon them, and thus produce a united state of mind. They were not able to pick out from the various school subjects what was glorious for the nation, to raise it above the level of a matter-of-fact account, and to kindle the national pride by such shining examples. At that time this would have seemed like chauvinism of the worst sort, which would hardly have been popular in that form. Righteous dynastic patriotism seemed pleasanter and easier to bear than the blazing passion of free national pride. The former was always ready to serve, while some day the latter might take control. Monarchist patriotism ended in veterans’ associations; nationalist passion’s course would have been hard to predict. It is like a high-bred horse, which will not stand everyone in the saddle. What wonder if people preferred to keep away from such a menace? No one seemed to think it possible that some day a war might come whose drum-fire and gas attacks would be a radical test of the durability of patriotic sentiment. But when it came, the lack of supreme nationalist passion was fearfully requited. People had little inclination left to die for their imperial and royal masters, and to most of them the “nation” was unknown.
Now that the Revolution has come upon Germany, and monarchical patriotism is thus automatically extinguished, the purpost of history-teaching is really nothing but simple acquisition of knowledge. This state has no use for nationalist enthusiasm, and what it does want it will never get. There could be no dynastic patriotism of ultimate vitality in an age when the principle of nationalities held sway; even less could there be a republican enthusiasm. For there can scarcely be much doubt that the German people would not stay four and a half years on the battlefield under the motto, “For the Republic”; least of all would those stay who created this miracle structure.
As a matter of fact this Republic owes its unshorn subsistance only to the expressed general readiness voluntarily to pay any tribute and to sign any surrender of territory. It is pleasing to the rest of the world, just as every weakling seems more agreeable than a man of oak to those who meet him. Of course this enemy fondness for this particular state form is also the most devastating criticism of it. They like the German Republic, and let it live because they could never possibly find a better ally in the work of enslaving our people. To this fact alone the splendid structure owes its present existence. That is why it can abandon any really nationalist education, and be satisfied with the “hoch” of Reich banner heroes who would run like hares if they had to protect this banner with their blood.
The Nationalist state will have to fight for its existence. It will neither receive it by signing Dawes Plans nor be able to defend its subsistence by them. But for its existence and its protection it will need the very thing which it is now thought possible to abandon. The more precious and incomparable form and substance are, the greater will be the envy and resistance of the enemy. The best protection will not be in arms, but in citizens; not fortress walls will defend the State, but a living wall of men and women, filled with supreme love of Fatherland and fanatical nationalist enthusiasm.
Hence the third thing to considered in scholastic education is:
In scholarship too the Nationalist state must see a means to further the national pride. Not only world history but the whole history of civilization must be taught this standpoint. An inventor must not seem great merely as an inventor, but he must seem greater yet as a member of the people. Admiration for any great deed must be transmuted into pride over its fortunate accomplisher as a member of one’s own people. Out of all the myriad great names in German history the greatest must be selected, and so impressively presented to youth that they become pillars of an unshakable national feeling.
What is taught must be systematically built up from that standpoint; systematically education must be so shaped that the young person leaves school not as a half-pacifist, democrat, or something else, but as a complete German.
So that this national feeling may be genuine from the outset, and not a mere hollow sham, one iron principle must be hammered into the still plastic heads of youth: He who loves his people proves it only by the sacrifices he is ready to make for it. There is no such thing as national feeling that looks only to advantage. No more is there nationalism that includes only certain classes. Huzzaing proves nothing, and gives no right to call oneself a nationalist unless a great, loving care for the preservation of a common, healthy nationality stands behind it. There is no reason to be proud of one’s people so long as one must still be ashamed of any single class. But a people half of which is wretched and careworn, even degraded, offers such a sad picture that no one should be proud of it. Only when a nationality is sound in every limb in body and soul, can joy in belonging to it rightfully rise in everyone’s breast to that height of feeling which we call national pride. And only the man who knows the greatness of his nationality will feel this highest pride.
Intimate fusion of nationalism and a sense of social justice must be implanted in the heart while still young. If that is done, some day a people of citizens will arise, bound to one another and forged together by a common love and a common pride, unshakable and invincible forever.
Our age’s fear of chauvinism is the symptom of its impotence. Not merely lacking any overflowing strength, but finding it downright disagreeable, our age is no longer chosen by Fate for a great deed. For the greatest upheavals in this world would not have been thinkable if their driving force had been merely the middle-class virtues of peace and good order, instead of fanatical, nay hysterical passions.
Yet assuredly this world is moving toward a great upheaval. And the one possible question is whether it will turn out for the good of Aryan humanity or the profit of the wandering Jew.
By appropriate education of youth the race-Nationalist state will have to see to the preservation of a generation ripe for the last and greatest decisions on the globe.
The people that first travels this road will be victorious.
The consummation of the racial state’s educational work must consist in burning a sense and feeling of race into hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it, impressing it through both instinct and understanding. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been brought to an ultimate comprehension of the necessity and nature of blood-purity. That will create the basis for the preservation of our nationality’s racial foundations, and this in turn the assurance of the conditions for further cultural development.
For all the physical and all the intellectual training in the world would at bottom still be useless if it were bestowed on a creature which was not fundamentally ready and determined to preserve itself and its special nature.
Otherwise the thing would happen that we Germans have already to bewail on a large scale, perhaps without as yet grasping the whole extent of our tragic misfortune: Even in the future we would remain mere cultural fertilizer—not only in the narrow sense of our present bourgeois view, which sees in a lost individual member of our people merely a lost citizen, but in the sense of the painful realization that despite all our knowledge and ability our blood is nevertheless marked for decline. By continually mating with other races we no doubt lift them from their previous cultural level to a higher grade, but we fall forever from our own elevation.
This education from the standpoint of race, furthermore must likewise receive its final consummation in army service. And indeed the period of military service should be considered the conclusion of the ordinary education of the average German.
Important as the nature of physical and mental training in the populist state will be, the winnowing of human beings in itself is no less so. Today we take it lightly. In general the children of upper-class, momentarily prosperous parents are those considered worthy in their turn of higher education. Here questions of talent play a subordinate part. A peasant boy may have far greater gifts than the child of parents whose station in life has been a high one for generations, even though he may be inferior to the city child in general knowledge. But the latter’s greater knowledge has in itself nothing to do with superior or inferior talents; it is rooted in the considerably greater abundance of impressions which the child keeps receiving as a result of his more rounded education and his rich surroundings. If the talented peasant boy had grown up from babyhood in similar surroundings, his capacity for intellectual achievement would be altogether different.
There is today perhaps one single field in which a man’s origin really counts less than his own native endowments—the field of art. Here, where one cannot simply “learn,” but must have everything born in him, and is only later subject to more or less fortunate development in the sense of wise fostering of the existing gift, the parents’ money and property cut almost no figure. This is the best of proof that genius is not confined to the upper classes nor to wealth. The greatest artist not infrequently comes from the poorest home. And many a village small boy has later become a celebrated master.
It does not speak well for the deep thinking of our age that this realization is not made to serve for all our intellectual life. People believe that what cannot be denied in regard to art is not true of the so-called exact sciences. No doubt a man can be trained in certain mechanical skills, just as an expert trainer can teach an apt poodle the most astonishing tricks. But in animal-training it is not the animal’s own intelligence which of itself leads to such exercises; and the same is true of man. It is possible, without consideration of any other talent, to teach a man certain scientific tricks, but the process is just as lifeless, as uninspired, as with the animal. It is even possible by dint of a certain intellectual drill to pound above-average knowledge into an average person; but it still remains lifeless, and at bottom sterile, knowledge. The product is a man who may indeed be a walking encyclopedia, but who nevertheless fails miserably in every particular situation and at every crucial moment in life; he has to be given special new training for every requirement, no matter how modest, and is unable to make the slightest contribution on his own account to the development of mankind. Knowledge produced by this sort of mechanical drill may suffice at best for the filling of a present-day State office.
It is to be taken for granted that in the totality of a nation’s population there will be talents for every possible field of daily life. It is further to be taken for granted that the value of knowledge will be the greater, the more the mere information is animated by the appropriate talent of the individual. Creative achievements can occur only when ability and knowledge are mated.
How boundless the sins of modern mankind in this direction are, another example may serve to show. From time to time the illustrated papers show the German bourgeois how a negro has for the first time become a lawyer, a teacher, perhaps even a minister or a heroic tenor somewhere or other. The feeble-minded bourgeoisie takes notice of such a miracle of animal-training with admiring astonishment, and is full of respect for this marvelous result of modern education; in the meanwhile the Jew is very shrewd about constructing from it a new proof that the theory of the equality of man, which he is forcing down the peoples’, throats, is sound. It never dawns on the degenerate middle-class world that this is truly a sin against all reason—that it is criminal madness to train a born half-ape until one believes one has made a lawyer of him, while millions of members of the highest of civilized races must remain in a position altogether unworthy of them; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator to let hundreds and hundreds of thousands of his most gifted creatures decay in the modern proletarian bog while Hottentots and Zulus are being gentled for intellectual professions. For animal-training it is, just as with the poodle, and not “scholastic” education. The same care and pains spent upon intelligent races would equip every individual for similar achievements a thousand times more quickly.
This state of affairs would be intolerable if it were ever more than a question of individual cases; and it exists intolerably today, because talent and aptitude are not what count for higher education. The thought is positively intolerable that hundreds of thousands of absolutely untalented persons are thought worthy of higher education every year, while other hundreds of thousands, highly gifted, remain without any advanced training. The loss which the nation thus suffers is incalculable. If the wealth of important inventions during the last few decades has shown extraordinary increase particularly in North America, this is in no small part because considerably more people of talent from the lower classes have a chance at higher education there than is the case in Europe.
Knowledge merely ladled out is not enough for inventing; it must be brought alive by talent. But to this we attach no importance; good marks alone are supposed to count.
Here too educational intervention from the state will be needed. It is not the state’s job to conserve the dominant influence of an existing class of society; its job is to find the most able brains among the totality of the nation, and to clothe them with honor and dignity. It has not only an obligation to give the average child a definite education in the primary schools, but the duty to set talent on the road where it belongs. Above all, it must regard as its highest concern that of opening the doors of the state institutions of higher learning to every talent, no matter from what class it comes. This task it must perform because that is the only way in which the inspired leadership of the nation can grow out of the class representing mere sterile knowledge.
For another reason as well, the state must exercise foresight in this direction. Particularly in Germany our intellectual classes are so isolated and fossilized that they have no living connection with those beneath them. This has evil results in two ways: in the first place they have no understanding of and feeling for the broad masses. Their connection here has been broken too long for them still to have the necessary psychological understanding of the people. They have become strangers. Secondly, these upper classes have not the necessary strength of will. This is always weaker in caste-bound intellectual circles than in the primitive mass of the people. Academic education, Heaven knows, we Germans have never had any lack of; but of strong will and decisiveness only all the more. The more “intellectual” our statesmen have been, for instance, usually the feebler have been their real accomplishments. The political preparations and technical armament for the World War were inadequate not because insufficiently educated brains governed our people, but because the men in the government were over-educated, stuffed with knowledge and intelligence, but without any healthy instinct, and lacking in all energy and boldness. It was a catastrophe that our people had to fight this battle for existence under the Chancellorship of a philosophizing weakling. If instead of Bethmann-Hollweg we had had a more robust man of the people as a leader, the hero blood of the simple grenadier would not have flowed in vain. In the same way, the excessively rarefied intellectual refinement of our leadership was the best ally for the revolutionary November scoundrels. By shamefully holding back the national substance entrusted to them, instead of staking it in its entirety, these intellectuals themselves made possible the success of the others.
In this the Catholic Church is a splendid model to learn from. The fact that its priests are unmarried forces it to draw the new generation of the clergy from the great masses of the people, instead of from its own ranks. This particular significance of celibacy is usually not realized at all. It is the cause of the incredibly vigorous strength in this ancient institution. Because the giant army of ecclesiastics is recruited without interruption from the lowest classes of the peoples, the Church not only preserves an instinctive nearness to the emotional world of the people, but assures itself of a sum of energy and activity such as is always available only in the broad masses of the people. Hence the amazing youthfulness of this giant organism, its intellectual adaptability and iron strength of will.
It will be the business of a populist state in its educational system to take care that there is a constant replenishment of the existing intellectual classes by new blood from below. It is the state’s duty carefully and scrupulously to sift the entire national population, discovering human material of obvious innate ability, and putting it to work for society. State and state offices do not exist to provide posts for special classes, but to accomplish the tasks that are set them. But that will be possible only if able and strong-willed personalities alone are trained for service. This holds not only for all government positions but for the intellectual leadership of the nation in every field. To succeed in training the most able brains for the fields that they are fitted for, and to put them to work for the national community, is one element in the greatness of a people. If two peoples of intrinsically equal endowments are competing, that one will win whose best talents are represented throughout its intellectual leadership; and the one will be defeated whose leadership is but one great common feeding-trough for certain groups or classes without consideration of the innate ability of individual members.
In our present-day world this does seem impossible for the present. It will be objected at once that the son of a high state functionary, for instance, cannot be expected to become, let us say, an artisan simply because someone else, whose parents were artisans, seem abler. That may be true in the present social status of manual labor. And for that reason the populist state will have to arrive in principle at a new attitude toward the idea of work. By centuries of education, if necessary, it will have to break the mischievous habit of despising physical labor. It will have to judge the individual man on principle not by the nature of his work, but by the form and excellence of his performance. This may seem monstrous to an age in which the most vapid penny-a-liner is more highly thought of, simply because he works with the pen, than the most intelligent precision mechanic. But, as aforesaid, this wrong evaluation is not inherent in the nature of things, but has been artificially inculcated, and has not always existed. The present unnatural state of affairs results simply from the general diseased condition of our materialistic age.
The value of every piece of work is in principle double: a purely material and an ideal one. The material value lies in the importance, the material importance, of a job for the life of the community. The more members of the nation derive advantage from a given accomplishment—advantage both direct and indirect—the more highly the material value must be rated. This evaluation finds concrete expression in the material reward which the individual receives for his work. Contrasting with this purely material value is the ideal one. It depends not on the importance by a material standard of the work accomplished, but on its intrinsic necessity. Certainly the material advantage of an invention may be greater than that of an ordinary hod-carrier’s job, but just as certainly society depends on the small service as much as on the great one. Society may make a concrete distinction in evaluating the advantage of the individual job to the community, and it may give expression to this by varying the rate of pay; but it must establish the subjective equality of everyone whenever each individual takes pains to do his best in his own field, whatever that may be. On this the evaluation of a man must depend, not on his wages.
In a reasonable state, care must be taken to assign to the individual the activity that suits his ability, or in other words to train able minds for the work they can do best. Ability, however, is not inculcated but inborn, a gift of Nature and no merit of the man. Consequently social position must not depend upon the job more or less forced on the individual. This job is to be attributed to his birth, and to the particular education which led to the community’s giving it to him. The evaluation of a man must be based on the way he handles the job for which society has made him responsible. The vocation which an individual pursues is not the purpose of his existence, but only the means to it. He himself should, on the contrary, go on cultivating and refining himself as a human being; but he can do this only within the confines of his cultural community, which must always rest on the foundation of a state. To the preservation of this foundation he must make his contribution. Nature decides the form of the contribution; all he must do is to pay back to the national community honestly and industriously what it has given him. The man who does this earns the top rank and the highest respect. The material reward may be given to him whose achievement is correspondingly profitable to society; but the subjective reward must consist in the appreciation to which everyone is entitled who devotes to the service of his nationality the powers that Nature has given him, and the national community has trained. That means it is no longer shameful to be a good artisan; but it is shameful to waste God’s days and the nation’s bread and butter as an incompetent civil servant. And it will then be taken for granted that a man shall not be assigned to a duty which he is unequal to from the outset.
Such activity, furthermore, is the sole standard for the right to universal, equal, legal-civil participation.
The present age is cutting its own throat: it introduces universal suffrage, and chatters about equal rights, but can cite no foundation for them. It accepts a man’s value as expressed in his material reward, and thus destroys the basis for the noblest equality that can possibly exist. Equality does not and cannot depend upon the accomplishments of individuals; but it is possible in the way in which each individual fulfils his special obligations. Only thus can the accident of Nature be eliminated in judging the value of a man, and the individual made the architect of his own importance.
In the present age, when whole groups of people know no way of judging one another except by salary classes, people have, as aforesaid, no comprehension of this. But this can be no reason for us to abandon the assertion of our ideas. On the contrary, he who would heal this inwardly sick and rotten age must first muster up the courage to lay bare the causes of the disease. That must be the concern of the National-Socialist movement: to gather and range in order out of our own nationality, beyond all hidebound mediocrity, those forces capable of initiating the battle for a new world-concept.
No doubt the objection will be made that in general the subjective evaluation is hard to separate from the material one, and that in fact the declining esteem in which physical work is held has been produced precisely by the lower rate of pay. This lower rate of pay, in turn, causes a restriction in the individual man’s participation in the cultural wealth of his nation. But this very fact damages the man’s subjective culture, which need have nothing to do with his work in itself. Indeed the best of reasons for aversion to physical work is that owing to the poorer rate of pay the cultural level of the manual laborer is perforce depressed, thus justifying a lower evaluation.
There is a great deal of truth in this. For that very reason it will be necessary in the future to avoid excessive differentiation in wage scales. Let no one say that then accomplishment would cease. It would be the saddest sign of an age’s decay if the impulse toward higher intellectual achievement lay only in higher pay. If this standpoint had been the prevalent one in the world thus far, mankind would be without it greatest scientific and cultural possessions. For the greatest inventions, the greatest discoveries, the most revolutionary scientific work, the most splendid monuments of human civilization were not given to the world through an urge for money. On the contrary, their creation not infrequently has represented an actual surrender of the earthly happiness of wealth.
It may be that money has become the sole sovereign of life today; but the time will come when man will kneel to higher gods once more. Many things may owe their existence solely to the craving for money and property, but there is probably very little of it whose absence would make mankind any poorer.
That is a further task of our movement: even now it must presage the coming day that will give the individual what he needs to live on, but at the same time will uphold the principle that man does not live exclusively for material enjoyment. This will find expression in a wisely restricted graduation of pay, which will allow every honest working man an honorable and decent existence at all times as a human being and a member of the nation.
Let it not be said that this is an ideal condition, such as this world could never endure in practice, and actually would never achieve.
We too are not so simple as to believe that a perfect age can ever be brought about. But this does not relieve anyone of the obligation to combat recognized faults, to overcome weaknesses, and to strive for the ideal. Harsh reality will of itself produce all too many restrictions. But for that very reason man must do his utmost for the ultimate goal, and failures must not divert him from his purpose, any more than he can abandon a judicial system simply because errors slip through, or any more than he would condemn medicine because there will always be sickness in spite of it.
We must beware of holding the strength of an ideal too lightly. If anyone is faint-hearted in that respect, I would like to remind him, in case he has been a soldier, of a time whose heroism was the most overpowering testimony to the strength of idealistic motives. The thing that men died for then was not concern for their daily bread, but love of Fatherland, belief in its greatness, the universal feeling for the honor of the nation. And only when the German people abandoned these ideals to follow the practical promises of the Revolution, and exchanged the rifle for a knapsack, did it arrive not in a Heaven on earth, but in the purgatory of universal contempt and universal distress.
For that reason it is particularly necessary to set up against the arithmaticians of the present realistic Republic a faith in an idealistic Reich.