VI. REACTIONARY

1

The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it.

The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been.

The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. He who has hitherto been wont to criticize the conditions of the state, without troubling overmuch to understand them, makes the disconcerting discovery that certain conditions, laws, interrelationships exist in the political world which cannot be ignored. He becomes suddenly conscious of a responsibility which forbids him to substitute for orderly government the improvisations he had had in his mind; he finds he must make adjustments, even at the cost of compromise. The actual needs of the millions, who after the severe upheaval yearn for some equilibrium in life compels him to make concessions to reality. The revolutionary has to become an opportunist.

The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new. He believes that if only he had the political power it would be perfectly simple to reorganize the world according to the admirable scheme of older days.

The reactionary recognizes the fact of the revolution but he refuses to recognize the revolution itself. He demands emphatically the restoration of the status quo ante.

The revolution has so obviously been wrong—historically wrong: as everyone can see after the event! It seems as if the reactionary might be right.

Let us go slowly—we must distinguish between the reactionary and the conservative.

2

The reactionary, like the revolutionary, sees the Revolution only as a political event.

The conservative on the other hand sees it as a historical event and recognizes behind the revolution a spiritual process in which the revolution has its origin—however undesirable the spirit of it may seem to him.

The thought of a people is the sum of its experiences with itself or with other nations. The Revolution brought the German people a revelation of its own nature, an experience which was lacking. The reactionary says: a wholly unnecessary experience. The conservative takes a different view, he says: an experience, which, now that it has occurred, we must immediately repudiate politically with all its works, but which we must historically endorse, because of the consequences it has brought.

The conservative reckons with the immemorial human impulses, the inalterable human passions. He realizes that any given situation is dependent on circumstances that may seem foolish and yet be full of meaning, which may seem accidental and yet be pertinent. He knows also that the full meaning of an event can only be gauged in the afterlight of its ultimate result. It was the most conservative of all Germans who made the least reactionary of all comments on the Revolution: "Who knows? There may be some good in it."

The reactionary is a spurious variety of conservative. He is a rationalist. He sticks to facts. He recognizes no consequences save the immediate ones. Thus he clings to the facts of the Revolution and pays no heed to its causes. He ignores the causes, partly because he himself is one of them—not as a person but as a type. Indirectly and unsuspectingly, he has allowed many a mental omission of his, which led to a political omission, to contribute to preparing the outbreak of a revolution which he was then powerless to prevent. He has not yet understood the Revolution. The conservative on the other hand understands the problems of the Revolution. He has a view of time and space into which these problems fit.

Each nation has its own peculiar and characteristic way of conducting its revolutions. We have seen how the German people conducted theirs. But no people emerges from its revolution unchanged. For one moment—out of eternity—the nation lives under acute stresses. And these reveal paths which had not before existed. This effect is more important than the immediate rearrangement of strata, the confusion of ranks, callings and classes which result from the upheaval. It effects a regrouping of forces. It releases what had become jammed. It makes an end of custom and permits men to contemplate the unaccustomed. It provides a new mental outlook which may be the starting-point of a new epoch of history.

The reactionary’s reading of history is as superficial as the conservative’s is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again. The reactionary’s policy is no policy; the conservative’s is policy on the grand scale. When policy makes history it is grand and enduring.

The reactionary confuses the one with the other and would fain reverse the course of history.

3

The present can never be entirely history or entirely politics. It is necessarily a blend of both: a transition from ephemeral politics into enduring history.

Similarly the present can never entirely distinguish revolutionary from reactionary elements. The general opportunism, the political confusion in which we are living and the hesitating, aimless attitude of the everlasting parties tend to blur all distinctions.

The advanced Left finds champions of its democracy in the ranks of the centre party, where one would only expect to find devotees, and moral-sticklers and the worshippers of a super-temporal ethos. The centre also produced a champion of the "fulfilment policy," who thought economically like a materialist and contrived to reconcile with his system of faith and morals the decision to "leave on one side" the question of guilt. On the other hand there are Roman Catholics who are passionately and unconditionally nationalist; there are socialists who have turned patriot and have no faith left in Internationals. And we might also notice that there are communists whose ideas of dictatorship are very closely akin to those which one associated with militarist bullies. So every German who reckons himself member of any party finds links with other Germans of other parties, according to the degree of expectation or disillusion which the War and the Revolution brought him.

A common fallacy identifies the reactionary and the conservative. There is however an unfailing touchstone by which Germans, whether of the Right or of the Left, can be divided nowadays into two great groups: the one, with a natural human weakness, fearful of the great unknown future, sighs: "If all could be again just as it was before!"—this group includes many sometime democrats and revolutionaries;—these are the real reactionaries; the other—and these are the real conservatives—yields to no flattering illusions but honourably admits the truth that life in pre-War Germany was horrible.

The reasons for this are not those advanced by the former opposition; not because much fault could be found with the Empire as it was, not because many things were lacking which we hail today as the achievements of the Revolution: la carrière ouverte aux talents for every man; the vote for every woman; councils for children; a black-red-yellow flag—or any of these apparently vital, essentially valueless things. Our life was horrible for quite another reason: for the all-pervading amateurishness which tainted everything in the public life of the Empire. Instead of a great and dignified state, worthy of a nation of sixty million, and genuinely representative of the nation, we had a grandiose state whose pomp and show sought to distract attention from the fact that the nation had no share in it. The Empire was formless. It had abandoned the conservative forms in which it was founded, and had adopted imperialist forms. It treasured a host of outworn conventions—based on superficially-interpreted tradition—which were sacrosanct, while it paraded a host of equally superficial evidences of its progressiveness. It was thus a hybrid state. Far from being embarrassed, however, by these inconsistencies, the age of William II pushed its self-conscious arrogance to extremes. With noise and display it advertised itself in unprecedented fashion to the world.

Its self-advertisement was based on many items of real value—on achievement and highly-developed skill of many kinds: on its technical and industrial performance and the growing share it was taking in world economics. Its best tradition was the Prussian tradition of practical accomplishment, but in all matters that concerned the latent gifts of the people, the co-operation of employer and employed in modern enterprises, the Empire failed to maintain its grand style. Only its militarism still showed style—a little garish perhaps, but serious and keen and unobtrusively diligent.

The Empire was based on this militarism, but the imperial policy was scatter-brained and indecisive, now challenging, now timorous, wholly lacking that consistent continuity which Bismarck had imposed. This policy was not dictated—as was commonly believed—by a sense of power, but by a timidity which took refuge in perpetual half-measures. William II in his self-conscious vanity was consumed by an irritable anxiety lest any affront should be offered to his power or to his personal prestige.

It is possible that a victory in the World War would have automatically put an end to this amateurishness. It is possible that if the War had not prematurely broken out, the German nation would have gradually of its own strength matured into its due position in the world. It is possible that the pressure of our population problem would have given both our socialists and capitalists an education in foreign politics and lent due significance to our economic policy, to industry, trade and commerce.

It is possible that our colonies would have reacted on the mother country, bringing freedom and salvation, releasing us from petty preoccupations, and from a life over-regulated by bureaucracy and police, and would have given scope to men of daring and enterprise, lovers of adventure.

There were unmistakably signs before the War that the German was gradually developing a cosmopolitan outlook. People of Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen can testify that interest in the Empire and an understanding of world affairs was no longer confined to overseas Germans.

Developments were taking place among the youth of the country, indicating that they were no longer content to accept the Empire as no concern of theirs, but were beginning to grow into it. If only time had been granted to us, the rising generation was promising gradually to evolve a consciousness of German nationality, a freer and worthier self-consciousness than the prevailing before 1914.

The sudden, unexpected and overwhelming outbreak of the World War summoned the nation to take its share in the Empire. The four years which followed proved again that we are a people at our best in grave situations; our collapse proved that we had been insufficiently prepared for this situation. The War revealed the worth, the strength, the sincerity of the people’s nature. The loyalty, the willing devotion with which the nation plunged into it, the courage, the endurance, the heroisms which were displayed on every battlefield, showed the attacking world what the nation was worth. But the collapse showed that the nation had no political cohesion. The nation has been compelled by the War and the upheaval that followed, to try belatedly to acquire that cohesion: we are acquiring it late, after the most cruel testing—and no one can yet foresee whether it may not be acquired too late.

The conservative recognizes the causes and effects that brought this doom on us. All are too closely intertwined and interrelated for it to be possible to reverse our fate. The reactionary on the other hand imagines that it can be met by the adoption of a policy which is essentially the same as that which failed us during the War and the Revolution. Against him he has, however, all the forces of youth and all the forces of the working classes, the only forces that the nation can still boast: new forces, determined to act creatively.

4

Revolutions are only interludes in history.

Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes.

Catastrophes serve to remind us of human carelessness. They come as a surprise, even though we may have long foreseen that they are bound to occur some day. They have the cruel logic of the elementary forces they let loose. But no one would maintain that they represent man’s real aim or his power of attainment in any sphere.

At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated.

We are now involved in this conservative counter-movement. So is Russia. Germany is thinking out her problems. The whole world is experiencing similar developments. There is no country where the spirit of revolution is not stalking abroad. There is not state which was not drawn by the War into the community of suffering, economic and evident. The very nations who have been spared the disintegration of a revolution are redoubling their efforts to preserve the cohesion peculiar to them, which has elsewhere been lost.

In the victor countries the conservative counter-movement is inspired by the desire to preserve political institutions and traditions which have in the past protected the nation and which proved their value in the War. The conservative counter-movement is strengthened by the secondary desire to perpetuate the victory, to treat the peace as sacrosanct and to garner its fruits. Here the movement is reactionary.

In the vanquished countries on the other hand the conservative counter-movements strain towards the future, seeing the necessity, if the ultimate goal is to be attained, of concentrating on the immediate goal of cancelling the decisions of a peace which would perpetuate the present. Here the conservative counter-movement is looking not for an end but for a beginning.

Russia, where the revolutionary upheaval began, was the first to make concessions to conservatism, to abandon one after another of its utopian doctrines. The first to go was the pacificist ideology. The creation of the Red Army marked the abandonment of one essential item of the rationalist programme to which the bolshevists had at first subscribed. They were compelled to take account of realities, to recognize that right cannot prevail alone—not even revolutionary right. So they organized the power of the state on military-political lines, preferring unrighteous might—for such it was according to all socialist-pacifist theories—to mightless right. The second concession, their production policy, as the Soviets style their foreign policy, sprang from sheer impotence, from lack of goods and lack of credit, from the necessity to pull through somehow even at the cost of a theory. An internal economic compromise accompanied the foreign one: free trading was again permitted, markets flourished once more and the famous fairs were renewed. These surrenders to international capitalism were unavoidable. They hit the bolshevist hard, because they were contrary to his communist principles, and involved the admission that the Marxist experiment had broken down. The truth is—and the point is psychologically important—that the greater-Russian Tartar is essentially a merchant and will not permanently forgo his right to barter. All these compromises, however, were made for the sake of preserving the Soviet state. Not one item of Uvarov’s triple formula—Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality—has been dropped. After the Revolution had broken the bureaucratic power of the Holy Synod, the Russian church was given the opportunity of striking deeper roots in the Russian people than in pre-Peter days; autocracy has been established by bolshevism in a peculiarly Russian, genuine Muscovite style and from its centre in the Kremlin rules over the capital and the whole giant empire; nationality is as much an axiom in revolutionary as in tsarist Russia and displays the same imperial greed. It is clear that the essential character of a people persists through all metamorphoses of a state.

The conservative counter-movement in Germany seems much more haphazard and aimless. It has no definite tendency, except the general one of trying to escape from the bonds imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, of trying to find an exit from the narrow prison house in which our wartime enemies have penned the nation. Domestic politics were confused with foreign politics; individual nationalists took the initiative with actions of despair which sought to give the country back her freedom of movement and yet accomplished nothing, as the various attempts from the Kapp putsch to the murder of Rathenau demonstrated—unless indeed they accomplished the very opposite of what they were designed to do.

These are exploits, however, rather of the expiring Revolution than of the conservative counter-movement. The conservative counter-movement, which in Russia is conducted by the state itself, is in Germany necessarily led by the opposition. In Russia the state is carrying the movement out; in Germany mental processes are going forward which are politically far more significant than mere opposition. A national opposition is being developed, directed against the German Revolution because it was essentially un-German, westernizing, pacifist and international, in contrast to the Russian Revolution which soon became essentially Russian in character. The conservative counter-movement represents the returning of the people to consciousness. It tackles all German problems: republic and monarchy; centralization and federalism; socialism and capitalism and the very principles of conservatism itself. It does not crave to restore the status quo ante. It seeks a reality in which the nation can come fully to its senses again. The people see that they have been deceived in believing that a revolution would bring world-peace, liberty, justice and a maximum of prosperity. They are beginning to reflect. The conservative counter-movement is the expression of their reflections. It is not a party movement. There is no party now in Germany that has not its conservative wing; all are inspired by conservative thought; liberals, opportunists, democrats, religious parties, even the revolutionaries. So far it only amounts to an impulse; we might call it a "lurch towards the Right" (Rück nach Rechts). It points, however, to a dawning realization that life consists in cohesion and not in disintegration and that revolutionary torrents debouch in conservative streams.

The conservative counter-movement does not seek to re-create, but to link up with, the past. This is the ideal which it sets above all others, even above the monarchical ideal. We do not seek reaction; we do not want a restoration which—apart from all other considerations—would have most disastrous foreign political repercussions. The age of William II lies behind us. The nearest approach to a Wilhelmine type which survives amongst us is the new German republicanism with its Reichstag parliament which is just as impotent and versatile and self-complacent as was post-Bismarck imperialism at its zenith. The Revolution brought to the surface all the inconsistencies, contradictions and dualities of the nation’s character. What is conservative thought to link up with? With the Prussian or with the federal ideal? With the centralist, or the centralist-Bismarckian, or the centralist-socialist ideal?

The one thing we have not got is a republican tradition. The German Republic has no roots. Germany never was a republic. Such republican tentatives as our history records, were of the feeblest and were never more than tentatives. If Germany is really about to enter on a republican era, which, as we have seen and said, is perfectly conceivable, she must start at the beginning to build up a national consciousness on republican lines. But though the revolutionary republicans have occasionally talked of nationalizing the democracy (and some of them have honestly endeavoured to be "good Germans"), they are still far from having accomplished this. Hitherto they have brought the nation nothing deserving our gratitude—not a single act of positive or symbolic value to enlist us on their side.

The position of opposition which has been taken up by the conservative counter-movement since the Revolution is therefore not one of opposition to the Republic as such, but of opposition to its policy, its policy of government, its "policy of fulfilment" or whatever we like to call it which seemed to be heading direct for the destruction of the Empire, the ruin of the nation and the demoralization of the people. Amidst all the chaos of the Revolution one sentiment has united people of all provinces and races and classes: their loyalty to the Empire. To this every soul in Germany clung and clings. This loyalty to the Empire, to which the Republic as the guardian of its black-red-yellow standard lays claim, is essentially a conservative idea.

The conservative counter-movement in the rest of Europe differs from that of Russia and Germany in this, that other countries possess complete freedom of movement in their foreign politics, at worst they suffer from domestic inhibitions. The conservative counter-movement is everywhere hostile to an international revolution with the disintegration of the state and the weakening of the nation that would follow in its train.

Italy is the cradle of nationalism and of modern attempts at unification. The national ideal there takes precedence of all other ideals. Though Fascism has allowed irredentism to colour its relations to other nations, its primary idea has been in practice to conquer economic radicalism by armed force. Italy has formulated a few powerful rhetorical maxims—now tinged with Roman, now with Machiavellian doctrine—and enforced them by a reign of terror. The chief of these maxims is the discipline of the state.

Throughout her history England has been the land of tough conservatism, skilfully masked by the appearance of liberal method. So far she has thus won through; she is now engaged in the despairing attempt to maintain her system of see-saw politics in the universal crisis which threatens the British World Empire. The English working classes will certainly prove selfish enough—which in England is identical with being conservative enough—to support this policy.

France has no ideas except indeed the one, fixed one—of maintaining by every military expedient, her predominant position of power on the continent. She clings to paragraphs and to machine guns and insists of the letter on the law. This is a reactionary idea for a people once so revolutionary. All the petty, little nations that have sprung up in Europe and Central Europe out of the ruins of the Russian and Austrian empires, and that form France’s military suite, lacking all tradition and as barren of ideas as France herself, imitatively adopt France’s one idea as their own.

Thus conservatism and revolution co-exist in the word today. Only the land of thought is left to us—as they said when they threw, as they thought, our carcase to the dead. We shall take a worthy revenge by evolving a conservative-revolutionary thought as the only one which in a time of upheaval guarantees the continuity of history and preserves it alike from reaction and from chaos.

Germany’s position is a central one. She is the focus of all political, economic and intellectual problems. If the world wants salvation, and so far as it deserves salvation, Germany will be able to express whatever this revolutionized world can hope to salvage. But German thought will not this time be content to evolve a system of philosophy existing only in German books for the rest of the world to benefit by.

The German nation has a bitter experience behind it; such an experience as never a nation was before called upon to suffer at the hands of other nations. This has provoked not merely philosophic contemplation but bitter self-examination, stern, cold passion which demands action. Conservatism and revolution would destroy each other, if the conservative had not the intellectual superiority over the revolutionary, and the political wisdom to recognize that conservative goals may be attained even with revolutionary postulates and by revolutionary means. Conservatism seizes directly on the revolution, and by it, through it and beyond it saves the life of Europe and of Germany. Retrospectively the revolutionary will realize that this is indeed a different life from the one his revolutionary doctrine foreshadowed, but that it is nevertheless the only life possible. It is founded on the laws of nature: and Nature is always conservative.

The nations want conservatism. When they cannot achieve it they makeshift with democratic opportunisms. But this temporary makeshift is inadequate and based on self-deception. Reaction is only another makeshift which skims over the surface of problems without solving them. Conservatism means the preservation of a people; it is the political art of enabling the nation to maintain its position in the world, according to the conditions in which its lot is cast.

Today we meet with mistrust and misunderstanding on every hand. "Conservative" is confused with "reactionary." There can be no greater antithesis. The conservative must step forward and make his position clear.

He must answer the urgent question: What is conservative?

5

A German metaphysician once said: "The power of releasing more and more completely that in us which is eternal—is my conception of what is conservative."

This is not the interpretation current among politicians, in press or party or parliament.

We confuse democracy with demagogy; aristocracy with oligarchy; federalism with particularism; centralization with unity; liberalism with liberty; "reason" with understanding; monarchy with absolutism; the nation with the masses. Similarly we confuse conservatism with its degenerate bastard: reaction.

This error is a hundred years old. It is a century since conservatism brought itself into disrepute as an obscurantist movement. In its name, European statesmen set up their system of statecraft with beadles and gendarmes, knout-wielding cossacks, and policemen. These reactionary systems everywhere made use of force to supply the place of the intelligence they lacked. In Austria the obsolescent state strove to maintain a prestige to which it had forfeited all right. France of the Restoration sought to stamp out all flickerings of a new revolution, whether the sects of the Saint Simonists with their infantile religious services in the Quartier latin, or the more dangerous reform banquets which preluded the barricades. The Russian Third Section with its anti-nihilist bureaucracy made martyrs of students and packed them off on the long road to Siberia. Perhaps it was also so in Prussia though to a vastly less degree—for Prussia never deserved the evil reputation it won, of having set the last and most abhorred example of reactionary tyranny.

Conservative though is based not on force but on power. Reactionaries use force; revolutionaries use force; conservatism seeks to gain power, not outward but indwelling power: a power emanating from a constructive idea, which confers impersonal right and possesses enduring potency.

If it were not for human imperfection this power might remain a purely intellectual and spiritual one. But experience has taught the conservative that men and nations must be governed, and he preserves their conditions of life, their customs and institutions for them by keeping himself in power. Conservatism is a law of nature; it recognizes that there are things in the world which are immutable: human, spiritual, sexual, economic factors. The great facts of human life are love, hate, need, daring, enterprise, discovery, strife, competition, ambition and the lust for power. Above all ephemeral phenomena reigns eternal immutability.

Conservatism—as the word implies—aims at conservation. It needs the recognition, not of one generation but of a series of generations who have experienced its permanence, benefited by its cohesion and grown up in the protection of its power. The mediaeval empire and the Roman Church were in their day institutions of similar power and extent. Wherever a true democracy has existed, it was a conservative expression of a nation’s desire for self-preservation, cast in the form suited to that nation. We might even assert that no state has more need to be conservative than a democratic one. And indeed all empires, whether spiritual or secular, maintained their power by remaining in close touch with the people and giving popular expression to the people’s desire.

Democracy was undermined when it became liberal. Liberal thought is disintegrated conservative thought; it leads through individualism to revolution. The world is in perpetual movement. Conservatism and movement are not mutually exclusive.

We have seen that the revolutionary does not recognize conservation but only turmoil, which he misinterprets as movement; when he attacks conservatism he confuses permanence with immobility; he confuses the conservative with the reactionary. All revolution is irrelevant noise, indicating disturbance; it is not the calm progress of the Creator through His workshop, it is not the fulfilment of His command. The world was designed for permanence; if it is momentarily jarred off its axis, its own force speedily restores its equilibrium. The revolutionary has value only so far as he clears the path for the conservative. The revolutionary identifies turmoil with movement, and movement again with "progress." He conceives the gradual perfecting of mankind as not only desirable, but possible, probable: nay, certain. Conservative thought on the other hand is never utopian but realist.

Conservative thought presupposes a principle: which a man, having freely adopted it, will maintain even under the direst stress. To have a principle, to maintain it, to act on it, not to swerve from it—this is a question of character.

The liberal’s principles are always relative; he is always ready to abandon one and adopt another so long as he can find a formula to justify his opportunism.

The reactionary has an absolute principle, but with him character has become obstinacy, life has come to a full stop.

The principle of the conservative is an organic one. His thought is that of a creative man who carries on the Creator’s work on earth.

All great men have been conservative and have felt like Nietzsche: "I want to be right, not for today and not for tomorrow but for centuries to come." Conservative thought does not believe in "progress"; it holds rather that "history" has her great moments which appear and vanish, and that the most man can do is to try to give permanence to them when they come.

The reactionary creates nothing. The revolutionary only destroys; though incidentally, as the instrument of ends he does not perceive, he thus in favourable circumstances creates fresh space. The conservative creates by giving to phenomena a form in which they can endure.

Conservative thought is the recognition of the fundamental conservative fact on which the world is based—and the strength to act thereon.

6

Politics are the stage and the stage-management of a period.

History is the drama that is played on the stage. The tragi-comedy of the Empire of William II is played out. It ended in tragedy. The reactionary wanders still over the empty scene. He still believes that the curtain has fallen on the best of all possible empires. He can suggest nothing better than the fresh performance of the same intoxicating play.

The reactionary is the inner danger, a danger to the nation. He has no feeling for those imponderabilia to which his idols Bismarck was so sensitive, which enabled that great statesman to foretell the ways of fate.

The reactionary is a man who toys with fate, and would seek to turn it from its course by a coup d’état: the man who cannot wait, cannot prepare the ground, cannot conjure up the opportune moment that brings certain success. He is willing enough to help but he only hinders. He has no feeling for psychology, no knowledge of men; he misjudges people and misunderstands problems. He is an opportunist, a man of the moment, and does not share the sense of responsibility that weighs on the conservative; he is so superficial that he conceives as easy a task which is going to prove difficult, so infinitely difficult.

Soon after the Ninth of November the reactionary began to think of reversal: he dreamt of a war of liberation—this was simple-minded of him and plucky. But his idea was to make things as if they had never been, and he thought of his way of liberation as conducted on earlier historic models. He dreamt of 1813 and conjured up visions of Schill and Blücher and the short-service system, of Fichte and Theodor Körner and even the Empress Louise: men and heroes and brilliant geniuses indeed, whose names it behoves us to cherish and whose spirit must be our inspiration, but whom we can never again have with us in the flesh. The reactionary’s favourite dream is of a war of liberation fought on the one hand against our hereditary foe and on the other against the working classes, a war which with one blow shall drive both disturbers of the peace out of our beloved fatherland—disturbers who prevent our living there as we used to live in the old days, which the reactionary thinks of as "the good old days." By a sudden volte face the next idea of our reactionary was that we should serve as the mercenaries of the Entente against bolshevist Russia. But war with Russia would have meant civil war in Germany; and how can a people win its freedom with civil war raging in the rear? The reactionary was too gravely out of touch with facts to realize that our sole hope lay in uniting all the peoples of the east against the west; the socialist peoples against the liberal peoples, continental Europe against negrified France.

The reactionary is unpolitically-minded. He imagines himself closely bound up with our past history and on this account lays claim to the privilege of leadership, yet is oblivious of the meaning of present history which shows the War and the Revolution as a unity and gives to all events their national obverse and their social reverse.

The reactionary stands between the nation and the proletariat; he has been the greatest obstacle to the co-operation of the extreme Right and the extreme Left. He has thought only with bitterness of a class on whom rests the burden of responsibility for the Ninth of November, the fatal day on which the glory of us all collapsed; it was very natural—but it was not politically wise and it was not nationally wise. The reactionary fails to realize that the war of liberation which lies ahead of us must be waged by the nation as a whole. We must all face it as the ultimate test; and if we fail to pass that test our downfall is inevitable. He does not see that the future holds two possibilities: not of a war of liberation only but of a civil war, which would bring not the ruin of the hated Republic, but the ruin of the beloved fatherland. He does not see that the proletariat, which he hates, is destined this time to lead the war of liberation which will be not only a national, but for the proletariat a social war also, and which will expiate the blunders of the Ninth of November. He fails to see that this was of liberation, led by the proletariat as the oppressed section of an oppressed nation, will be a war of world-ideals, a "citizens’ war" directed not against ourselves but against the bourgeoisie of the world—to whom we are being sacrificed. If we win this final war we shall thereby win the Empire back for ourselves, not the Empire of the reactionary’s dreams but the EMPIRE OF US ALL.

The conservative thinks of Germany’s Third Empire. Just as the mediaeval empire of our great Germanic emperors lived on in Bismarck’s Hohenzollern empire, so the Second Empire will live on in Germany’s Third Empire. The conservative is fully conscious that history is an inheritance which the peoples of the past hand on to the peoples of the future. But this inheritance must be striven for and won, and won again, that the unity of the great trinity may be perfected; the great trinity of empires of which we know the past and the present ones, while the future one exists as yet only in our dreams.

Germany’s Third Empire will come into existence when we will. But it will live only if it is a new creation, not a slavish copy of the earlier empires.