No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines, trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your thought? Where is the thought of Germany? We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be, what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought of Germany. This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground in the new epoch, and which fulfils it. This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things. For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a thinking nation among the nations. But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation? No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little work and little production. For the next decade the question will be, not where is the demand but where is the supply? The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years' War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice the decline. Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more than valuable production or cheap production; it is something exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.