Well then, picture to yourself the presupposed new régime to be as kind and as benevolent as you will; make it good as God; will you also be able to invest it with divine understanding? Even though it may, in all earnestness, desire the highest happiness and welfare of all, will the best welfare that it can comprehend also be the welfare of Germany? I accordingly hope that I shall be perfectly understood in reference to the main point that I have presented to you today; I hope that in the course of my remarks many have thought and felt that I merely express clearly in words what has always lain within their hearts; I hope the same will be the case with the other Germans who will some day read this address. Several Germans have said approximately the same things before me, and that sentiment has lain obscurely at the basis of the opposition continually manifested against a merely mechanical establishment and estimate of the State. And now I challenge all who are acquainted with modern foreign literature to prove to me what later sage, poet, or lawgiver among them has ever given birth to a prophetic thought similar to this, which regarded the human race as being in continual progress, and which correlated all its temporal activity only with this progress; whether any one of them, even in the period when they soared most boldly to political creation, demanded from the state more than equality, internal peace, external national fame, and, when their demands reached the extreme limit, domestic happiness? If this is their highest conception, as must be deduced from all that has been said, they can attribute to us likewise no higher needs and no higher demands upon life, and--always presupposing those beneficent sentiments toward us and an absence of all selfishness and of all desire to be more than we--they believe that they have made admirable provision for us when they give us all that they alone recognize as desirable. On the other hand, that for which alone the nobler soul among us can live is then eradicated from public life, and the people, who have always shown themselves receptive toward the impulses of higher things, and the majority of whom, it might be hoped, could even be raised to that nobility, are--in so far as it is treated as they wish it to be treated--abased beneath its rank, dishonored, and blotted out, since it coalesces with the populace of the baser sort.