Well then, picture to yourself the presupposed new regime to be as
kind and as benevolent as you will; make it good as God; will you also
be able to invest it with divine understanding? Even though it may, in
all earnestness, desire the highest happiness and welfare of all,
will the best welfare that it can comprehend also be the welfare of
Germany? I accordingly hope that I shall be perfectly understood in
reference to the main point that I have presented to you today; I hope
that in the course of my remarks many have thought and felt that I
merely express clearly in words what has always lain within their
hearts; I hope the same will be the case with the other Germans
who will some day read this address. Several Germans have said
approximately the same things before me, and that sentiment has
lain obscurely at the basis of the opposition continually manifested
against a merely mechanical establishment and estimate of the State.
And now I challenge all who are acquainted with modern foreign
literature to prove to me what later sage, poet, or lawgiver among
them has ever given birth to a prophetic thought similar to this,
which regarded the human race as being in continual progress, and
which correlated all its temporal activity only with this progress;
whether any one of them, even in the period when they soared most
boldly to political creation, demanded from the state more than
equality, internal peace, external national fame, and, when their
demands reached the extreme limit, domestic happiness? If this is
their highest conception, as must be deduced from all that has been
said, they can attribute to us likewise no higher needs and no
higher demands upon life, and--always presupposing those beneficent
sentiments toward us and an absence of all selfishness and of all
desire to be more than we--they believe that they have made admirable
provision for us when they give us all that they alone recognize as
desirable.
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