A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described, the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles? Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class, the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the Continent came into being. Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question! Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations; it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it, "thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to any mission for humanity, it does not lead.