The political attitude of the forties was very much the same. The national enthusiasm, the wars of freedom, and the sanguine hopes which had attended the downfall of the Corsican, had, like the expectations aroused by the Revolutionists of the days of July, ended in miserable disaster. The touching confidence which a nation, all too naive in politics, had placed in its princes had been shamefully deceived and abused. All dreams of union and freedom seemed to be extinguished for a long time, and the flunkeyism which was unfortunately only too rampant in the nation, ran riot, while frank souls stood aside in disgust. The more eager the spiritual enthusiasm had been on the threshold of two centuries, the deeper now did apathy weigh upon men's spirits in the period of the forties. The fuller men's souls had been of surging and stormy ideals, and wishings and vague longings of all kinds, the emptier did they now become, and not only Stirner could with justice give to his "only individual" the motto, "I have placed my all on nothing," but it was the motto of all Germany at that time. And yet in one thing Stirner is the type of his people as contrasted with Proudhon. He is the most complete example of the German who lacks that proud self-sacrificing view of the life of the community, that feeling of the inseparability of the individual from the mass of his people--which is the token of the French,--but who at all times has suffered from a separatism that destroys everything. He is the typical representative of that nation to whom its best sons have denied the capacity of being a nation, but which has therefore been able to produce more striking individualities than all other civilised nations of the time. * * * * *