The question is not very urgent.
As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.
The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a
Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.
From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall
certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will
soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes.
For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve
shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
right tip.
The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
"great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
smiled at by those of the third.
But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or
the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the
centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars.
We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What
is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and
the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of
a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.
But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers
or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total
of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The
People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or
gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of
humanity, that we have here to do.