It is self-evident, they presuppose, that every
one would rather die than become thus, and that a true German can wish
to live only that he may be and remain forever a German and may train
all that belong to him to be Germans also.
They have not all died; they have not seen slavery; they have
bequeathed liberty to their children. All the modern world owes it to
their stubborn resistance that it exists as it does. If the Romans had
succeeded in subjugating them also and, as the Roman everywhere did,
in eradicating them as a nation, then the entire future development of
mankind would have taken a direction that we cannot imagine would
have been more pleasant. We, the immediate heirs of their land, their
language, and their thought, owe it to them that we be still Germans,
that the stream of primitive and independent life still bear us on;
to them we owe everything that we have since become as a nation; and,
unless we have now perhaps come to an end, and unless the last drop
of blood inherited from them is dried up in our veins, we shall owe
to them all that we shall be in the future. Even the other Teutonic
races, among whom are our brethren, and who have now become foreigners
to us, owe to them their existence; when they conquered eternal Rome,
no one of all these nations yet existed; at that time the possibility
of their future origin was simultaneously won in the struggle.
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