This singular belief in the past, rather than in the future, is indeed a human weakness and has checked and restrained the rise of intellectual freedom since the world began. * * * * * ¶ It might all have been a good lesson to republicans, but the nobility assumed a threatening attitude and the peasants did not understand a monarch like Joseph. Their idea of a king was a man going upstairs on horseback and eating spiders. A king must have powers of life and death and bags of gold. A citizen king was absurd. The peasantry, on whom Joseph had endeavored to bestow many large democratic privileges, rose against him. He died Feb. 20, 1790, "a century too early," says Jellenz, and as Remer adds, "misunderstood by a people unworthy of such a sovereign." * * * * * ¶ Germany, in the sad period between 1750 and 1806 had long been a European political jest; these are hard words, but it is the language of truth. She had sunk so low that she saw no degradation in going off to fight French or British wars, while at home remaining a mere political nonentity. She had sunk so low, under French influences, and through her own lack of self-control, that she forgot her great ancestors and her noble traditions. She had sunk so low that her very children were brought up to despise the language of the Fatherland; the children scoffing at the parents, aped foreign ways rather than support German originality, strength and national genius; young men coming of age preferred to leave the land of their birth, mocked the simple German virtues, and occupied themselves in idle dalliance in Paris, or failing in this, set up imitations of French courts in the petty German monarchies. Thus, finally Germany became insensible, indifferent and debased by stupid and selfish ideals from beyond the Vosges; till at last Germany became, literally, a land without a people, a people without a land. ¶ Worse still, the time came when, under these false teachings, a sense of shame no longer lived, to arouse great national interests and to recall degenerate sons to their solemn duties to their Fatherland. Hundreds of noble Germans, at one time or another, during these dark years, tried in vain by voice or pen to restore national consciousness, but failed. The problem of German liberty seemed incapable of solution; and as for the still larger problem of German unity--that became a mere dream. * * * * * ¶ We glorify here and now, the genius and the manhood of Bismarck as the one man who had the strength of purpose to recall to Germans the heroic tale of a free and united Fatherland. It took him thirty years or more, through well-nigh superhuman striving; he preached, he cursed, he vilified, he used the iron rod.