VII. CONSERVATIVE

1

We live in order to bequeath.

The conservative is the man who refuses to believe that the aim of our existence is fulfilled in one short span; the man who believe that our existence only carries on an aim.

He sees that one life is not enough to create the things which a man’s mind and a man’s will design. He sees that we as men are born each in a given age, but that we only continue what other men have begun, and that others again take over where we leave off. He sees individuals perish while the Whole continues; series of generations employed in the traditional service of a single thought; nations busy in building up their history.

The conservative ponders on what is ephemeral, and obsolete and unworthy; he ponders also on what is enduring and what is worthy to endure. He recognizes the power that links past and future; he recognizes the enduring element in the transitory present.

His far-seeing eye ranges through space beyond the limits of the temporary horizon.

2

The liberal thinks on other lines. For him life is an end in itself. He demands liberty to enjoy life to the utmost, to procure the maximum of happiness for the individual. Provided one generation enjoys life and another follows and enjoys, man’s well-being—at any rate the liberal’s personal well-being, which is always his first consideration—is assured.

The liberal is, however, chary of using the word enjoyment; he prefers to talk of progress. Men are continually perfecting means to lighten the burden of life, and the path of liberty leads through progress to gradual perfection. Thus the liberal tries by generalities to divert attention from the egotism which liberalism invented so as not to be without some philosophy of its own.

The conservative sees through this humbug. The liberal must admit that everything which he as an individual undertakes is dependent on the conditions of life of the existing community. He must admit that, while repudiating all obligation, liberalism seeks to enjoy the fruits garnered by an earlier conservatism.

The revolutionary holds yet another opinion. He does not want to create. His immediate aim is to abolish. He renounces the past and swears devotion to the future. He talks of a millennium that will some day dawn—but it is the immaterial figment of an ever-receding future.

The revolutionary shares the liberal’s idea of progress; or rather he presupposes it, leaping from the real to the utopian. He shares the biological illusion—which dominated all our thought during the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century—that life is based on evolution, and consequently that the evolutionary possibilities of all human affairs are infinite.

The conservative recognizes no evolution, only genesis. He does not of course deny the phenomena of evolution. But he contends that nothing can evolve which was not primarily in existence; evolution is a secondary phenomenon; genesis is a primary phenomenon.

We can examine the history of all ages and of all peoples, we shall never discover progress. We see values created wherever men of strong will, or mighty popular movements, are in play. When we enquire how they came into being we find that Nature like history knows no progress, but only continuity, tradition.

Values are a matter of grace. They arise suddenly, spontaneously, demonically, when their time is fulfilled. When the rationalist deliberately sets out to "make" values—whether with reactionary or progressive intent—his creative power fails him. Since men invented the idea of progress there has been nothing but retrogression. The liberal century was upon us.

The conservative justifiably believes that our whole age has gone astray. The revolutionary believes that the world has always been astray until today, and that our only help can come from an entirely new organization of life. The liberal is as always unteachable. Even in the face of the catastrophe he contends there has been democratic progress, and would deny that it was his principles which our enemies were skilful enough to exploit in the War and of which we were the sacrifice. He would deny that we owe the misery of Germany and every retrogression in Europe to these principles of his. The conservative on the other hand seeks to discover where a new beginning may be made. He is necessarily at once conserver and rebel. He asks: what is worth conserving? The conservative and the revolutionary have this in common that they alike despise the juggling, mystery-mongering and pettifoggery that are the liberal’s stock-in-trade.

The conservative’s enemy is the liberal. The conservative has a high opinion of men—and at the same time a low one. He knows that men can achieve things worthy of all reverence when they unite to defend their existence, to fight for their future, to maintain their freedom. But he does not deceive himself: he knows that when men or nations or epochs give their egotism free rein, and live for their own lusts, existence becomes a thing of dirt.

3

The German Revolution was the work of liberals, not of revolutionaries. That was its doom.

It was the work of opportunists, not of fanatics. It was a pacifist Revolution to end a war whose burden had become intolerable and the continuation of which seemed aimless. It had no ideal of its own, but snapped at an ideology whose expounders were trusting in promises that came from the west, the home of liberalism. It was hoped by revolution, by change of constitution, by surrender to the will of the enemy, to obtain conditions which would make life possible again. The liberal tendencies which exist in all democratic parties were given play, and finally the social democrats brought the Ninth of November on our heads.

German socialism was also corrupted by liberalism. Its basic idea of social justice gave birth in the course of the nineteenth century to a party of enlightenment which tossed the brightly-coloured balls of "progress," "liberty," "equality," "fraternity" from hand to hand, and yet was content to be nothing more than a party of adaptation. The social democratic party became the party of "evolution" in the particular application of the word which characterized the nineteenth century, and transferred the idea from the domain of natural science into that of universal history. Is it to be wondered at that the party gave no heed to genesis and origins?—that it ignored problems of space and population?—that it was blind to the fact that industrious and expanding nations rise in the scale while dwindling populations, consumers rather than producers, must sink? This would seem rather a vital consideration for a party whose main concern was professedly social justice. The initial principle of such a party should have been that social justice for men, strata and classes presupposes social justice for nations.

German social democracy adapted itself, however, to the liberal age; it soon exchanged its revolutionary stride for the parliamentary jog-trot. It went into opposition and the only manifestation of radicalism it betrayed was the criticism which—in truly German style—it directed against government of its own country. It was a party of petty German bourgeois who called themselves internationalists, and as such did not trouble their heads about the international conditions which were essential to the existence of their own national state. The German social democrat was so obsessed by domestic politics that he had no eye for foreign politics. Had not Marx assured him that the rule of the proletariat would eliminate all national distinctions between peoples!

So the social democrat waited for the day of his power and did not, or would not, perceive that a century of war was beginning, war between class and class, between nation and nation. He contentedly busied himself with his Erfurt Programme which enunciated enlightened views about workmen’s protection acts, the secularization of schools, the rights of wives, religion as the private concern of the individual, etc., etc., but dismissed with a few benevolent phrases all political questions of real import: the declaration of peace and war should be left to the "people’s representative bodies"; an effort should be made to solve all international quarrels by "some method of arbitration." It was easy for a great war to take such a party by surprise; they had foreseen that "a good old smash up" was bound to come, but had overlooked the deeper problems underlying it.

No party could conceivably have been less qualified to take over and carry out a revolution which had been precipitated even more by domestic than by foreign pressure. If it was to be successful, it would have needed World-Revolutionaries to carry it out—and these were lacking. A true German socialist revolution should have concluded a socialist peace, which meted to its nation its due, and not a "liberal" peace which robbed its own nation of its right; not this westernizing, world-capitalist Peace of Versailles which was dictated by a combine of states to one, and which decreed that the less-industrious nations might lay greedy hands of the surplus labour of a more-industrious people.

A people must be prepared beforehand for a revolution. A revolution has its own tradition in the spirit of the revolting people; it is dependent on the men who make it, and they on the genius, or lack thereof, of the nation they belong to, with which their fate is bound up, however much they may call themselves internationalists.

The genius of the German people is not revolutionary. Still less is it liberal. It is conservative.

For this reason—if no other—the Revolution was only an interlude.

4

The German Revolution was not even a revolutionary interlude.

The political incompetence of the German socialists was so great that they were able to retain power only for a couple of stormy days or weeks the governing power which the Ninth of November suddenly put into their hands. Then the Revolution ignominiously retreated before democracy which took over the government instead of the proletarians, who vainly waited for the day of their dictatorship. The realists and the opportunists had to content themselves with sneaking in under the aegis of democracy, and securing for themselves a personal, parliamentary influence and a share in the formally controlled democratic conditions which were subsequently formed between the social democrats, the centre democrats, the party democrats of every popular party and even the national liberals. The German Revolution became a liberal interlude.

The liberal made good use of the following years. He consolidated his political position by the humble fulfilment of the Treaty of Versailles. He accepted the conditions to which the result of the War had brought the Empire, even professing to find them entirely tolerable and well-pleasing. The liberal is an acquiescer by profession, he eats any dirt that is flung to him. His position in the state was not a strong one. He had not so much seized power after the upheaval as had had it thrust on him. He did not owe it to his own strength, and still less to the inherent strength of the German people. He owed it to the dubious favour of circumstances, to the fear of Russian revolution and the benevolence of the western democracies.

We could have borne all this if the liberal had so demeaned himself as to show that he appreciated the national distress, and if he had displayed the unobtrusive intention of working towards ultimate resistance. He had snatched for himself whatever benefits accrued from the Revolution, his sole anxiety in those years was to prevent the masses from realizing how intolerable the position was. The moment when the people forsakes democracy may well prove dangerous for the liberal, especially if it happen to coincide with our second revolution: the radical revolution of a people of sixty millions, in despair because they are denied the right to live.

The liberal democrat could not prevent conservatives still existing who were sensitive to the disgrace under which we were living; he could not prevent this consciousness of shame growing steadily stronger amongst all politically-minded people and in the form of nationalism taking hold of the youth of the country, as it grew up into political consciousness. Administrative necessity had compelled him to turn for help to whatever conservative elements still existed in the country, and he became accustomed to rely on their trustworthiness whenever the danger threatened of the state having to defend itself against the proletariat. This did not prevent his playing off the Left against the Right and arming himself with emergency laws which could be turned equally against either. The democracy which had come into power during the Revolution felt the need of "preserving" itself, and appealed to the nation to acknowledge the Republic, to recognize the Weimar Constitution, and to accept as an accomplished fact the complete metamorphosis of our government institutions.

Every revolution has had to make a like demand, when once it set about establishing itself as a government. The revolutionary who snatches power is at once compelled to seek a conservative basis for his administration. This lies in the nature of power, of government and of conservatism: without which community life is impossible to man. The question arises whether the conservative is bound to place himself at the service of a revolutionary state. When the revolutionary government is engaged in a defensive external war, there can be no question: the conservative will take service under any government that is governing for the sake of the nation and not merely for the sake of governing.

5

The democratic idea of the state is different from the conservative; though, as we have seen, we can imagine a state in which democracy and conservatism are united. What was the reason that we failed to get a democratic-conservative state? Both Left and Right in different ways bear the guilt.

The state which crashed in the Revolution was a state-for-the-sake-of-the-state. Incidentally it existed also for the sake of the Empire, for German unity, and for the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was for us the symbol of the state and which—according to the good conservative principle of the Fredericks—existed for the sake of the people.

But the state did not exist for the sake of the nation. It could not. A nation is a people conscious of its nationality. We must face the fact that we were not such a nation. We were conscious of the state; we accustomed ourselves to it because we knew that it protected us.

Before the War, the liberal was crying out that the German people must be made politically-minded. He was thinking of democratization and parliamentarianization. He did not see that a people must first be nationalized before it is democratized. To democratize it without having first nationalized it leads only to democracy-for-the-sake-of-democracy. For an immature people this is just as much a makeshift as the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state but it lacks two things which the latter possessed, the inner cohesion and the outer protecting power. Instead of waiting till our foreign war was successfully ended, we were so unwise as to involve ourselves in an internal political crisis, which gave our revolutionary parties the right to substitute the policy of which they were the sponsors, for the only policy worthy of a state—that willingly adopted by the people. This led us to a democracy. Such was the fate deservedly incurred by a people that lacked all the qualities of nationhood, that had allowed itself to be talked over by its liberals into abandoning conservative principles. This transition stage was exploited by the revolutionary for his own ends, not in order to weld a people into a nation but to create an upheaval for the sake of an upheaval.

If from the ruins of the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state, there had arisen the state-for-the-sake-of-the-nation, we might have looked back on this day of mourning as the brightest in our annals, we might for all time have celebrated that great day—as other nations celebrate their revolutions.

But the opposite occurred. The people listened to the voice of the tempters from the west, who assured them that Germany’s future depended on her altering her constitution. They responded to the talk of a world peace that should follow the World War.

After such weary years they were decoyed by promises of a better life for all nations, and believe that this should be the lot of the Germans also if only they would lay down their arms. The people were unsuspecting, they entrusted the peace to their enemies. The peace was such as might have been expected.

Whose fault was it? Obviously the fault lay with the people, with the masses who for a few brief weeks had acted as the German people; it lay with their leaders who had built up their policy on the ideal of a democratic state.

The deeper guilt, however, lies with those responsible up till the Ninth of November for the conduct of the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state. Those who were responsible for the conditions that were the cause of the Revolution and that made the Revolution possible; who were responsible for the fact that a state, which appeared securely established for all time, should have become they prey of illusion and self-deception and have plunged into the distress and misery of our revolutionary days.

The conservative has no difficulty in reconciling the ideals of a conservative and a democratic state. This reconciliation is in harmony with the development of German history. Along these lines the German nation can be evolved. He only fears that we may first perish of democracy.

He is free from all the intrigues and arrière-pensées of party politics. His party is Germany. He is not a conservative for the sake of the state but for the sake of the nation. The power of the state—for he cannot conceive a state without power—is welcome only for the sake of the country’s freedom.

The hour which sees this freedom established will not be the hour of liberal, nor of parliament, nor of party—but of the conservative. He is the New German of Today: though if we interpret him in the light of history we shall recognize in him the Old German of Always.

He will be able to rise to the height of that hour only if he recognizes that the chasm which sunders Right from Left is the chasm between two mutually hostile philosophies, a chasm which we have so far failed to bridge.

When he recognizes that those who upheld the conservative ideal of state in the nineteenth century were false to the spirit of conservative thought; that the age of William II was false to a conservative tradition which had existed in pre-Bismarck Germany before the foundation of the Empire, and indeed had existed in Germany from the dawn of history.

The conservative will rise to the height of that hour only if he, whose function it has always been to act, proves himself not only manfully ready to act but spiritually capable of acting.

6

The Left has reason. The Right has understanding.

It is characteristics of the confusion of our political thought that we confuse the two conceptions.

The confusion began with rationalism, with the inference: Je pense, donc je suis. The age of reason adapted this and said: "I am a reasoner, therefore my reasoning is correct." The result of thought was identified with truth. This fallacy underlay the devastating influence which reason exercised on understanding. Reason trespassed outside her intellectual domain. True reason should guide emotion, not destroy it. This false reason destroyed feeling and thereby forfeited all guidance, all inspiration, all intuition. Reason should be one with perception. This reason ceased to perceive; she merely reckoned. Understanding is spiritual instinct; reason became mere intellectual calculation.

The consequences showed themselves first in the political sphere. Reason it seemed was capable of drawing any deduction that self-interest wished to draw. Reason arrived at the conclusion that the highest wisdom is to be found when each contributes his individual wisdom. Only understanding is capable of drawing the simple inference from empiric fact, that when all act exactly as they like, the net result is wont to be an infinity of unreason. What everyone thought was for the best, proved the worst for everyone.

Understanding and reason are mutually exclusive; whereas understanding does not exclude emotion. Rousseau perceived this, and took his stand against rationalism on the basis of the "reason of feeling." But he was not able to shake the position of rationalism. The marriage of reason and sentiment only made reason the more rabid. Whereas she had at least been a seventeenth-century lady, she now became little better than a whore, the bedfellow of every rationalist. When the French Reason raised her to the rank of a goddess, the last shred of her reputation was gone. She formed all the political ideals of Europe and developed into that "idle reason" which Kant exposed as our most dangerous self-deceiver. Her baneful influence brought us eventually to such a pass that we lost our hold on moral values and imagined that reason was the guarantor of justice.

In the west, and in all countries where sly reason held commerce with political ideals, people soon discovered that it may be extremely advantageous to talk of the rights of man, of liberty, equality and fraternity, but highly dangerous to put these into practice. Reason then acquired a double application, according to whether a man’s own interests were at stake or another person’s. A mood was skilfully created in the world at large, which uncritically accepted as progress everything that happened in western countries or was imported from them. France no longer spoke of the sovereignty of the monarch, but of the sovereignty of the state—and gave the state over to party corruption. England spoke of public welfare and left her people socially backward. In later days the western powers spoke of peace and the love of peace, while they prepared themselves for war.

Germany was completely taken in. Before the War committed the folly—which we imagined to be the height of wisdom—of seriously believing in a "world policy without war" as Lichnowsky and his fellows formulated it; and we saw in the policy of "encirclement" only a peaceful "bye-product of the loftiest political adjustments." So, during the War—by which time we really might have known better—we continued to believe in a peace of reason and to trust to states and statesmen who posed as pacifist. After the War our theorists imagined that a voluntary confession of guilt would touch our enemies to mercy; they had not acumen enough to distinguish the proximate cause from the intention, the accidental from the essential, the formal from the psychological guilt.

The Right has always had understanding enough to see the devastation which reason would wreak amongst men.

All that the conservative stands for: security for the nation, preservation of the family, devotion to the monarchy, the discipline that regulates life, the authority that protects it, constitutional self-government in professional and corporative organizations—these things are the practical derivatives of his knowledge of men. All great men have been great conservatives; all have done homage to this eternal principle. They had every right to distrust a rationalism which developed only the brain and let the human being perish.

Conservatism is a nation’s understanding. German conservatism—not a political party but a conscious principle—was the one thing that we needed to win the War. Now after the War it is only the conservative who understands and is able to interpret the events, who feels no surprise that the Revolution failed or that the peace brought fourteen points of deception.

It was French conservatism and English conservatism, however,—not German—which possessed sufficient knowledge of men to lead their peoples to victory. German conservatism failed in its allotted task.

After the Revolution, in order to discredit the Right with the country, the Left asserted that we owed our collapse to the breakdown of the conservative system. This is untrue. The system which broke down was not the conservative, but the constitutional system. The Kaiser himself was no conservative monarch, but a liberal. The loss of the War was the price we paid for his liberal half-measures. Liberalism and the Kaiser lost the War. Apart from the fighting, liberalism lost the War all along the line: in principles, parties, persons.

The fault of conservatism lay not in its principles, which are sound and unalterable. The guilt lay with the representatives of conservatism whose principles had lost their spiritual content. The fault lies in the spiritual bankruptcy which had overtaken the nation.

The German conservative had forgotten that he had first to win what he was to conserve; that a thing can only be conserved by being incessantly re-won. The cause of conservatism was lost when its last, best, greatest representative Wilhelm von Humboldt, went over to humanism, and the conservatives had not the courage to follow and keep their claim on him, but left the liberals to adopt him as their own. In the same way German conservatives neglected to complete the work which Freiherr von Stein had begun, and felt themselves more at home with Metternich at the Congress of Vienna and in the atmosphere of the Holy Alliance.

Conservative circles did not throw up one single man in later days to lead the cause; when they wanted a mouthpiece they had to borrow from men of other races, of other nationalities: from Stahl or Chamberlain. The conduct of our foreign affairs fell into the hands of increasingly incompetent diplomats, none of whom realized that statecraft is history in the making. The members of the All-German Union were at least aware of the problems that arose from Germany’s position as a world power, but they confined themselves always to physical dangers, to the fall in the birthrate and to race suicide—they never touched on the question of spiritual and intellectual deterioration.

During this period the liberals held aloof from the nation’s real problems but dominated the literature of the time, and by busily keeping pace with all the developments of thought, science and taste presented an appearance of mental activity, and while producing nothing of permanent value, at least controlled the slogan market.

The conservatives on the other hand took refuge in stereotyped phrases. No conservative seemed to remember that a conservative’s function is to create values which are worth conserving.

7

The parties of the Right could do nothing to avert our collapse. They were forsaken of God—whose name they invoked merely from habit. They had forgotten to win the heritage that had been committed to them. Where they had formerly been leaders they had lost touch.

The parties of the Left seized the opportunity of thrusting themselves forward, and claimed the right, as apparent representatives of the people to the apparent leadership. The same process is to be observed in all parliamentary states.

Among the western powers the parties of the Right dominated; and though the parties of the Left were well represented, the western statesmen were aware that in all question of power they could reckon on a strong conservative bias even amongst the extremer socialists. Cosmopolitan speeches were made; peace speeches evoked particular enthusiasm. None of these entailed responsibility, but they sounded impressive. And their effect was deceitful if their intention was not.

Germany was taken in over and over again. We preferred to make patriotic speeches; but this was only to conceal the fact that a nation was being addressed which had to a certain extent achieved external apparent unity, but which lacked all the elements of inner cohesion. It was rare, however, for anyone in the age of William II to look facts in the face. The parties of the Right would give rein to their vexation against sections of the people, and pillory them before the European public as untrustworthy; and conversely the Left never missed an opportunity of harping to the foreigner on the backwardness of our German state.

The only wise conservative tactics would have been to win these malcontent elements for the nation, and inspire them with loyalty to the nation. But after Rodbertus no attempt was made to make an idealist appeal to the proletariat and teach it to identify its aims with the aims of the state. The German masses were never told that only foreign policy can come to the rescue of an over-populated country. The nation was educated intellectually, but no one even tried to educate it politically.

Thus the War caught us unprepared. When it broke out, a sudden consciousness of unity naturally took hold of all, for all felt themselves endangered. The people drew together; party politics were shelved; elementary instincts asserted themselves; we sent forth our army; a living army, not torn by conflicting opinions, but one in will. Then the most fatal possible course was pursued. An optimism born of the soft, liberal sentimentality that was the curse of the Wilhelmine era was given free play. Everything was seen through rose-coloured glasses. Our prospects were painted in the brightest colours. Lies were told us. Everything was depicted as easy, which was in fact so difficult. No one told the people how terrific the War was going to be; how incalculable its duration; how unthinkable the consequences if it were lost. We were assured that it was bound to be short. That it was already half won. That it would soon be decided, happily decided, in our favour.

In the middle of the War, while battle was raging on every front, peace was being talked of at home. We were assured that this peace—which increasing privations made more and more desirable—was not a question of victory, but of reason. The conservative thinker knew that this was humbug, but kept silence. When it was already too late, the conservative thinker was induced to make lame and half-hearted concessions to the opposition, but he did so without conviction.

Meantime democracy was vocal; before the War somewhat shamefaced still; during the War more and more shameless. Democracy was armed with all the weapons of intellectualism and of a reason which was subsequently to prove that it had been un-reason. The conservative thinker, who had lost the habit of independent thought, was powerless. His sons had fallen on the battlefield, that was the sole contribution they could make to the nation’s cause. Meanwhile the father had to look on at events which he could not prevent. The conservative parties were more and more crushed out; their adherents were bewildered. The day of upheaval demonstrated their timidity and helplessness.

Liberal statesmen, denying the conservative foundations of their creed; politicians, scenting a chance of making a career; journalists, no longer disguising their francophil leanings; a press that seemed predestined to help to lose the War; the suggestibility of our people; demagogues inspired by vanity or rancour to words of treachery—these all conspired in the name of reason to give a turn to the War which indeed brought it to an end, but which also brought about our collapse. The parties of the Right still had understanding on their side; they had no illusions; they faced realities; they foresaw the historical consequences which must follow. Understanding remained a conservative monopoly.

But it was not possible to make understanding prevail against reason, to which the Left unremittingly appealed.

Every German who accepted his fate consciously, whether peasant or workman, nobleman or commoner, socialist or clerical, showed conservative traits in his manliness; he realized what was at stake. But he and his fellows made a vain sacrifice because they were united only by the patriotic phrases and not by an immanent patriotic ideal, which should have been set before the immature nation while there was yet time.

Before the War conservative thought had been the monopoly of an exclusive society. Our defeat restored the principle to the whole community to whom it originally belongs. This permits all persons, whether they owe allegiance to the Right or the Left, to feel that all are members of one body, the nation to which they belong. This abandons "idle reason" wholly to those idle folk whose decisions are dictated by what they love to call "sound common sense." This vaunted "common sense" is just as useless as "good will" and our boasted gift for the "practical." We have staked too often on this worthless trio—and lost. They are self-evident—or perhaps threadbare. The only thing that is self-evident and not threadbare is understanding.

8

Conservatism is another thing which must be constantly re-won. Conservative thought perceives the eternal principle which, now in the foreground, now in the background, but never absent, ever reasserts itself because it is inherent in nature and in men.

This eternal principle must be continually recaptured amidst the transitory. Creative conservatism was non-existent in the Wilhelmine Germany of the end of the nineteenth century. The great Germans of the beginning of the century—who were all conservatives—had left a mighty legacy of thought which the conservatives failed to conserve.

Our state was founded, it is true, on conservative thought. But the conservative accepted the state as something established and inalterable. He could not conceive any state but a conservative one. He was right as regards the eternal factor in the state, and perhaps the time is not far off when the people will see that he was right. A non-conservative state is a contradiction in terms. A state must conserve. But the nineteenth-century conservative had not arrived at this principle himself; he had taken it over at second-hand; he was repeating parrotwise the judgment of his fathers whose blood and brains had gone to the creation of the state. The collapse of the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state was a conservative tragedy; the tragedy of unworthy grandchildren.

The grandchildren lived after their fathers’ pattern. In their private lives they were manly, fearless and blameless. They served their King and Kaiser as their fathers had done. This was not enough. The conservative tradition still lived in their blood, but no longer in their spirit. They considered this tradition their political privilege; they lost touch with the people. The conservative was not aware that his consciousness of nationhood was a thing apart which the people did not share. This was our doom. It is true that we were all reared in patriotism; patriotic words had prepared the people for patriotic deeds. This method proved its value on the First of August. Sixty million people felt themselves "WE."

But the people were not national at heart. They were inwardly unprepared for great events, such as every politically-minded people must be ready to face. Moreover they were undermined by distrust of the conservative thought in which they had been reared.

The fatal result was the Ninth of November. Then the sixty millions thought as "I" though they imagined themselves as being a "we" mature and free. Liberalism was responsible for this mistake which even deceived the socialist, and which deceived the people. They were misled into committing the task of carrying out their will, first to their Commissioners and then, under the reign of parliaments which were called democracy, to their voting papers.

The history of the next years, the conclusion of the Peace, the policy of fulfilment, revealed the calamity that overtakes a people which puts its faith in reason and not in understanding.

We have all learnt much since 1918. Socialists observed how the postulates of a socialist system broke down, in face of an age adapted to advanced capitalist development. The incalculable happened, for which the socialist was not prepared. The moment when he was to grasp political power coincided with the end of a war which left the nation in a state of economic disintegration. The incalculable upset his calculations. It was not possible to realize socialism by succeeding to the economic power of a single class. Socialism only acquired a meaning when it embraced the whole people and their economic necessities.

The conservative for his part overcame the mechanical socialism, which was purely theoretic, by an organic socialism which could be put in practice. He conceived a socialism that should start with the group, with the community, with the corporative unity of the whole nation. Such a socialism was familiar to the conservative from the idea of guilds and callings and professions which he had inherited from the specifically German past. The Left had become familiar with the same socialism by the idea of councils in the development of which the Russian revolutionaries had set an example.

Right and Left had made a mental approach to each other which might lead to a political approach. Communist Left and conservative Right were united in their distrust of parties; in their distrust of the liberal and egotist taint in party life which attaches more importance to the programme than to the cause; in their distrust of the parliamentary party system which necessarily sets the party before the nation even though it acts within the framework of the nation. They were further united by the thought of a dictatorship; hard experience having taught that human welfare cannot safely be left to human caprice, but can only be attained by compulsion and leadership and the direction of someone designated to supreme control. Thus a solution of the problems was being sought and might have been found in some adjustment which would become possible the moment that the Left was willing to abandon Marxism and the Right, reaction.

The Left did not in the end do this. It clung to it party standpoint and its class war, though the social democrat Left made continual compromises in which these things were sacrificed.

The new-socialist thought of these last years has gained some insight, but it has not been able to shake off its party prejudices and class rancours. It has only learnt to content itself with makeshifts, with parliamentary compromises and formally democratic half-measures. The thought of the young-socialists is only an attempt to formulate a philosophy; and communist thought is concentrated on willing a will but one which is contrary to nature and threatens forcibly to break the continuity of history.

In contrast, however, to socialist thought which centres in its own problems, conservative thought concerns itself with the problems of every sphere, those which are peculiarly conservative, and those of the opposition which must be solved if conservative life is ever to be possible again.

To which end nothing could have been more useful than that the conservative should have been driven to re-examine his own postulates.

And to search his own conscience.

9

Conservatism is not reaction.

The reactionary clings to existing conditions or wishes them back if they have changed. He can conceive the world only as it was at the day of his birth. His thought is in its way as circumscribed as that of the revolutionary, who can only picture the world as it was the day he overturned it.

In contrast to these the conservative is accustomed to get busy and do something. He has no ambition to see the world as a museum; he prefers it as a workshop, where he can create things which will serve as new foundations. His thought differs from the revolutionary’s in that it does not trust things which were hastily begotten in the chaos of upheaval; things have a value for him only when they possess certain stability. Stable values spring from tradition. We may be the victims of catastrophes which overtake us, of revolutions which we cannot prevent, but tradition always re-emerges.

Revolutions have eternity against them.

Conservatism has eternity for it. The cosmos itself, spinning on the axis of law, is no revolutionary phenomenon but one of conservative statics. Nature is conservative. The mightiest phenomena of destruction are trivial compared with the power of procreation which immediately comes again into play and year by year and century by century brings similar forms of life to birth.

The conservative recognizes that human life maintains itself in nations. He therefore seeks to maintain the life of that nation to which he belongs. The reactionary puts his faith in forms; the conservative in the cause. What cause is ours today? What is the only possible cause? What cause MUST be ours? On one point the conservative is clear: our only cause, now and for ever, is Germany’s.

The conservative inherits from his fathers the motto "I serve." How can he best serve the German cause? Faced by this question, the conservative must get to grips with the republican ideal and with the legitimist ideal.

It would be quite conceivable that we, who for a thousands years have been a monarchical people, should be for the next thousand a republican people. This possibility should have less terror for the conservative than for anyone. Conservatism can be combined with any form of government. The Roman conservatives were republicans. Their Cato saw no hope for Rome if it were to become hellenized and to accept a Caesar. Yet the inevitable change in the Roman constitution and in Roman culture, which to the patriots had seemed to spell certain ruin, ushered in the greatest age of Rome. Similarly France, and England under Cromwell, and Russia under Peter, experience profound constitutional readjustments with which conservative thought was able to keep pace.

Only Germany remained always a monarchy. The World War has certainly been mentally a parting of the ways, a turning-point. It is entirely conceivable that a change should take place from a monarchy to some new form of state; it is even possible that the Old Germany will perish and form the foundation on which a New Germany shall rise.

The German Republic arose from revolution; and the revolution from betrayal; and the betrayal from stupidity.

When once the people has become a nation, it will be difficult, nay probably quite impossible, to delete this sequence of origins from the memory of men. The Ninth of November—a date as covered with shame as the First of August is with glory—failed to bring political renewal. The War was still in progress. But the revolutionaries ran up their red flag and made signals to our enemies. What would become of Germany? They never asked; they were thinking of humanity; and the masses were thinking of themselves. If the thought of humanity was victorious, so reasoned the revolutionary leaders, then Germany would be cared for among the rest. But most of them did not think of Germany at all.

The revolutionaries might have had a perfectly free hand—for as long as the Revolution lasted the foreigners could not tie them down—to insist on a socialist peace such as they had promised the people. But amidst the fall of princes, generals and ministers not one great socialist rose to bring new order to the world. These amazing world-upheavers waited anxiously to see what the world—and for them the world meant the Entente—would permit them to do or to leave undone. They would have had the opportunity to experiment with many a daring plan. Having the power they did not even consummate the union of Germany with German Austria. When they perceived that the Entente was betraying them, they could think of nothing better than to hearken to the cowardly and vain advice of an old fool whose political wisdom was this: "only confess! Confess that the guilt of the War is yours! and you will be granted a merciful peace!" Till finally there was nothing to be done but make a big election urn into which a patient people might throw its voting papers for a National Assembly. The National Assembly forthwith dismissed the revolutionary clique and threw the responsibility for the government on to the Republic. No genius presided over our Revolution.

Even a republic must have some tradition. A republic is impossible without republicans. Republicans cannot exist without pride in their republic. We have had tentative republics in our long history. We had the confederations of the towns and we had the Hanseatic League. These were never able, however, to act for the nation; their policy was purely a business policy, never an imperial policy. The republican attempt of 1848 with its dream of a Greater Germany was so full of pure ideology that it had no effective policy at all. The German revolutionary republicans who followed the Novemberites hauled down their red flag again. They began somewhat belatedly to ponder on their German allegiance, and to give expression to it they seized on the black-red-and-golden flag that had once been the symbol of a great enthusiasm, but later the symbol of a grievous German disillusionment. It was not their fault that the black-red-yellow flag of the Republic was fated to be once more the flag of disillusionment rather than of enthusiasm. The Republic under which we are living is an uninspired republic. We cannot even make it "interesting" as a commonplace democrat once suggested in a peculiarly commonplace touring speech.

Is our Republic a republic? Is it not still a monarchy bereft of all symbols in which men believe: monarchy in deepest degradation? So the legitimist thinks. His opinion is that we need only restore the monarchy in order to recapture the position we enjoyed while we still were a monarchical people.

The conservative cannot agree. He is a monarchist because he believe in the power of a leader as ensample. But the conservative’s monarchism is founded on a higher conception of monarchy than that of the legitimist, who is solely concerned with the power of the symbol. The German Republic has been obliged in these years to depend on the support of our enemies. This has been hard for Germany and, we may well suppose, bitter for the republicans. But it would have been intolerable for a monarch.

If, or when, it is finally demonstrated that democracy cannot save us; would it not be most natural for us to have recourse to a monarchy again? The answer is No. A monarchy ought to be won; and we see today no sign of a monarch who could win it. Even if we suppose that the man exists and is in waiting somewhere needing only a summons, we cannot perceive conditions which would make it possible for him to show himself. A tolerated, graciously-permitted monarchy under the supervision of foreign parliaments, under the guarantee of foreign governments—that would be no monarchy in its own right, let alone a monarchy by the Grace of God.

A monarchy must be fought for. It cannot be accepted as a gift. The idea of monarchy involves the idea of consecration: which the last of our monarchs desecrated. The man to whom a king is holy, and an emperor glorious, must obliterate himself today. Political conditions are not favourable for a monarchy; spiritual conditions even less. There is nothing in the German world either royal or Christian: and so there is no king. There is nothing imperial in the German world today: and so there is no emperor. Only the people itself is there: the German people, waiting to become a German nation. At this stage our need is rather for leaders. We need popular leaders whose only party is Germany—it matters little whether they are of the democratic or of the aristocratic type, whether they prefer the role of Marius or that of Sulla.

We need leaders who feel themselves at one with the nation; who identify the nation’s fate with their own; leaders who, whether they spring from the old leader-class or themselves create a new one, will devote all their powers of decision, of will and of ambition to securing the future of the nation for Germany. It is very possible that we shall need a long and changing succession of such leaders to nationalize the people, and then to make the new-born nation politically-minded; leaders under whom the German history of yesterday can work through the effects of the Revolution and pass on into the German history of tomorrow, into which we should without them drift leaderless; leaders who will know how to hold the scale even between the possibilities which still remain to us and the new possibilities which are only opening before us; leaders not concerned that a party should be always right, but that one person’s will should prevail; leaders who in the uncertain future into which we are sailing will steer a straight course and through all vicissitudes and storms will keep their bearings and pass on the chart to their successors.

The Revolution threw up no such leader. The Revolution produced only revolutionaries each of whom abdicated next morning. Leadership is not a matter of ballot-boxes, but of choice based on confidence. The disillusionment which the parties have wrought, has created a receptivity for the leader-ideal. Youth is entirely for it. The monarchy had no room for this ideal; the monarch claimed the leadership himself; but he claimed it exclusively as a matter of privilege, and not of merit. Not till the Revolution came was the leader ideal made possible, the ideal of a leader who shall not destroy but conserve.

The Republic is now at the helm. A republic which would give scope to a leader is perfectly easy to conceive. For the sake of ending our insecurity it is easy to imagine the republic reverting to conservative traditions—worthier, more deeply rooted and of greater antiquity than those we abandoned in 1918—and reviving a form far more truly German than western parliamentary government and party systems—leadership. The time now again approaches fulfilment. Fulfilment cannot come until the slow task of making a nation out of the German people, is complete; until the conservative this time is sure of the nation; until the pressure of this unendurable life has wrought a mental preparation in the people; not until then shall we be ready to alter that fate for which every German bears in his own way a measure of responsibility.

To be a conservative today means to help the German people to discover the form of their future.

10

The question: "what is conservative" leads on to another: "When will conservatism become possible again?"

The confusion of conservatism with reaction arose when our political life lost its conservative basis and was invaded by reactionary phrase-mongering on the one side, and on the other by revolutionary ideology, the latter ultimately gaining the upper hand. The confusion will end only when conservatism itself has once more become conservative.

The conservative counter-movement, which is active all through German today, is a fight against the Revolution, an effort to call a halt. It is at the same time, however, a reckoning between the conservative and the reactionary. The reactionary lives with his eyes on the past; the conservative, from his point of vantage looks before and after, from what is past to that which is to come. The revolutionary on the other hand looks forwards only. He is the heir of the liberal who invented "progress," and who today, especially in the victor countries, is selfishly intent on enjoying the loot which he secured. The liberal is the reactionary of Yesterday’s revolution seeking to enjoy his Today. The revolutionary movement is against him, shaking the foundations of Today, while the conservative counter-movement would secure for Today its due position in eternity and aim not at restoration but at a fresh linking up with the past.

The revolutionary denies the conservative counter-movement and opposes it. He has promised too much. He intended to make the world totally different from what it had been before; he dare not confess that he deceived the world and himself. He is himself, however, beginning to succumb to the influence of the conservative counter-movement, though he would not care to admit it. He promised once—to quote the communist manifesto—"the overthrow of all hitherto existing social order." Here spoke revolutionary thought. But the German communists’ new programme flings at imperialist capitalism the age-old reproach, that it has failed to establish "either the economic or the political equilibrium of the world," and that it is powerless to create "a new, stable, enduring world-order." There speaks conservative feeling.

The German communist believes that during our Revolution the proletariat was very near the Marxist goal, was just about to lay hands on the helm, to seize surplus values and to confiscate property values. The thinker among the communists well knows that the Revolution failed because it was a liberal revolution.

He is, however, reluctant to admit that the forces which defeated it were eternal conservative forces which have always existed and will always exist. Every revolution is wrecked on the same rock. Again and again the communist is forced to recognize that there are in the world forces of tradition, of survival, of unalterable law. Yet if the proletariat was absolutely alone in the world, if no other human life had ever been—even then in an existence regulated on the strictest Marxist principles, the great conservative law of gradation would immediately begin to assert itself and the primitive instinct to form groups, families, nations, would prevail; order would arise—and history would inevitably repeat itself.

At this point the socialist will protest that he never spoke of any other equality than that which would follow on the elimination of economic contrasts, and that a social order founded on this elimination is entirely feasible. Communists would contend that their equality means only community of the means and of the products of production. Democrats would be content with an equality of classes which would be bound to react on governmental and economic institutions.

All this is correct in theory, but the idea is false. If the ideal of equality is not the ideal of socialism, then socialism has no ideal at all. Equality has been the compelling principle of socialism, as love was the compelling principle of Christianity. From the trinity of French Revolutionary catchwords the socialist plucked out the "equality"—leaving the "liberty" and "fraternity" to be the stock-in-trade of sentimental liberal demagogues, and adopted Babeuf’s fiction that equality and justice were one. This identity of equality and justice became the centre of the socialist ideology.

At an earlier stage of development, Saint Simon’s demand was: "To each according to his gift; and to each gift according to its value!" Marx took up the cry and preached a coming day when "the slavery arising from the subordination of the individual to the division of labour" should be abolished; the materialist interpretation of which was: "To each according to his need!" Lenin took up Saint Simon’s challenge, and, recognizing that equal right for unequal individuals—and, we would add, for unequal nations—leads rather to injustice, he drew the conclusion that the bolshevist’s equality of work and of reward established only a "formal justice" and that the task of creating an "actual justice" lay still ahead.

The circle of socialist thought is for the moment complete in Lenin. Lenin could not admit that his conclusion brought him back exactly to the point where men have always stood when they tried to order their existence in a state—to the very point where a new state necessarily stands which is seeking to evolve a just system which is bound to lead, not to ultimate equality but to a new inequality.

Leninism meantime has had the opportunity of making experiments with reality. The Russians have experienced what the transition period is like, between a capitalist and a communist society, and have experienced what is called "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and—or so it seems to us—the Soviet state has moved not in the direction of communism, of which Lenin spoke, not in the direction of realizing utopia, but in the direction of political realities.

The conservative thinker has the advantage over the proletarian thinker in knowing the historical relationships—the historical relationships on which the world is hinged. This is not merely a question of book knowledge which may be belatedly—though with how much difficulty!—acquired. However perseveringly the proletarian strives to raise himself, his self-education always remains somehow amateurish and inadequate, narrow and circumscribed. This is a matter of inherited knowledge, which the conservative has in his blood and which gives him an inborn gift for leadership.

The reactionary’s world has crumbled about him, because he had allowed his values to lose their value and his life to become a routine. The revolutionary lives in the illusion that this collapse gives him the opportunity for giving existence an entirely new set of values according to laws evolved in his own head which he can compel the present to accept. He divides the past, a time of history but unhappiness, from the future, a time of happiness but no history. He established a new calender which divides history into two periods, the first from the beginning of human life on earth until Karl Marx—from whom time must henceforth be reckoned—the second from Karl Marx until the end of man’s life on earth. But the continuity of human history bids defiance to this illusion. If we suppose that for one moment the revolutionary were to succeed in "overthrowing" and apparently annihilating all traces "of the previous social order," on that same day the conservative law of movement would reassert itself.

At best, communism has in its favour the seventy-five years during which it has been preparing the proletariat for the world it is to conquer with class war. But these seventy-five years have against them the sum of uncounted millennia, the cosmic nature of this planet, the biological nature of man, a human nature which not even the greatest, the most profound, the most spiritual, the most intimate revolution in history—the appearance of Christ and the introduction of Christianity—has been able to suppress or to alter. They have against them the characteristics of race, the results of civilization, the laws of space which outlast every shift of the historic scene and the men and forces which act thereon, laws to which even Christ and Christianity are obedient. The revolutionary conceives history as beginning with him. Marx spoke of the proletarian movement as the "independent movement of the immense majority." He did not see that everything which today is seen in motion, moves not of itself, but is in fact moved by the momentum of the millennia that lie behind.

Marx imagined that he could set himself above the continuity of history. He believe that he had discovered, in the material and economic conditions of life, the conditions that made history. He believed that once these conditions had been discovered, the future history of mankind could be "made" by the materialist.

But the conditions are spiritual. The slim pamphlet that contains the manifesto of communism seems to the ingenuous socialist like Faust’s book of magic. Ranged against it are St. Augustine and Dante, the myths of prehistory, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, the protests, the criticisms, the idealisms of the Germans of our great period. Our sense of form, enduring and ineradicable in our modes of thought, rebels against the substitution for European culture of a proletarian cult. Against a mass-age, oblivious of nationality, rises up in revolt the individual history of every land.

Russia has proved this. Everywhere in the world the communist experiment comes up against the conservative forces whether Russian or European which the revolutionary is unable to master. Lenin mentioned them on occasion, and as a theorist he spoke of them as the "survivals of the Old" which meet us "at every step in the New," "in life, in nature, in society." As a statesman. He acted on the recognition that there existed a connected between the "New" which he was creating and the "Old" which persisted: a conservative connection which the revolutionary cannot set aside. The conservative sees the "Old" of which Lenin spoke, not as a fragmentary survival, but as the Whole, the ever-present, the all-embracing, the imperishable. For him the "New" is merely the accidental addition of the time. When the "Old" has stagnated into the conventional, or even into the reactionary, then the "New" may well serve to set the "Old" in motion once again. Our Revolution will certainly have this effect, if it does not end in complete disintegration but leads on to comprehensive reorganization.

The effect will not be a revolutionary reorganization—which is a contradiction in terms—but a conservative reorganization. Russia is already setting the example. When the figure of Lenin took the centre of the stage as leader of the bolshevist Right, he owed his position to his unsuspected conservatism. In Germany the immediate result of the Revolution was a reversion to conservative thought. The conservative must now be take on himself the problems of the Revolution which neither proletariat nor democracy has been able to solve, and lift them to the plane of his own philosophy.

Such signs indicate that in Germany as in Russia the "second phase" of the Revolution is going to be a conservative one. It is true that the revolutionary continues to think that it will be a communist one. Face to face with the irreconcilabilities of reality, he tries to salvage his theory. Lenin tried to take comfort in the thought that human nature when once subjected to communist education would gradually "grow accustomed to obey the rules of social communal life without subordination or compulsion, or the apparatus of compulsion." Lenin constantly recurred to this idea and spoke of "the rules in all traditions for tens of centuries" to which men who had thrown them off must "reaccustom" themselves.

This is the last hope of the revolutionary; but it is a conservative hope, nay, almost a reactionary hope. The conservative cannot be content with a "growing accustomed" which is a static ideal and reduces men to the level of a human herd. The conservative aims at combining conservation with movement, in which man can show his mettle and preserve his values.

The revolutionary wants the "New" of which Lenin spoke; he wants it above else. The conservative is convinced that the "New" can be absorbed, not into the "Old" but into the "Whole" to which it belongs. The revolutionary has set himself the goal in thought and feels confident of achieving it in practice. The future world in which his goal will have been attained he can conceive as that which the Marxists promised. The powerful logic of the class-war idea captures the proletariat, whose thought never ranges outside the problems of the proletariat. But the revolutionary’s philosophy has to surrender before a richer, more highly developed, many-sided philosophy, which conceives life as a whole, of which proletarian life is but a part: the superior philosophy of the conservative.