Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom, spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions. There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began. The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our babble about it. The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair of the heart's blood shelved. We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we have only to fall-to. In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20] there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our festal oratory.