"We are still deeply sunk in the mire of the Middle Ages, and no man can yet see when this flood of blood and tears will have passed away. However far the glances of a few brighter intellects may reach into the coming ages, the progress of humanity is unspeakably slow. Wherever we look abroad into our own time, we behold the unbeautiful relics of a past that we had believed to be overthrown long ago. Our systems of government, our nobility, our religious institutions, our official arrangements, the organization of our armies, the condition of the laboring classes--everywhere the scarcely hidden relation between masters and slaves; everywhere the critical choice whether we will be hammer or anvil. All our experience, all our observation seems to prove that there is no third alternative. And yet no greater misconception of the real state of the case is possible. Not hammer _or_ anvil, hammer _and_ anvil is the true word, for every man is both, and both at once, in every moment of his life. With the same force with which the hammer strikes the anvil, the anvil strikes the hammer; the ball is thrown off from the wall at the same angle under which it impinges upon it; the elements which the plant has appropriated in its growth, it must exactly restore in its decomposition--and so throughout all nature. But if nature unconsciously obeys this great law of action and reaction, and is thereby a cosmos and not a chaos, then should man, whose existence is subordinated to precisely the same law, acquire an intelligent knowledge of it, and endeavor intelligently to shape his life in conformity with it; and his worth increases or diminishes exactly in proportion as he does this or neglects it. For though the law remains the same, whether the man knows it or knows it not, yet for himself it is not the same. Where it is known, where the inseparableness, the unity of human interests, the inevitableness of action and reaction, are recognized, there bloom freedom, equity, justice, which are all but varying expressions for the same law. Where it is not known, and he fancies in his blindness that he can with impunity make a tool of his fellow-man, there flourish rankly slavery and tyranny, superstition and priestcraft, hatred and contempt, in all their poisonous luxuriance. What man would not naturally wish rather to be hammer than anvil, so long as he believes that the choice lies open to him? But what reasonable man will not cheerfully renounce the part of hammer, when he has learned that the part of anvil will not and cannot be spared him, and that every blow that he gives smites also his own cheek; that the serf corrupts the master as well as the master the serf, and that in politics the guardian and the ward are rendered equally stupid. Would that the consciousness of this might at last penetrate to the mind of the German peoples, who stand so sorely in need of it!