for that matter, states or parties or peoples in general. It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless.
The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.
But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word, an educator — not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but an exemplar in doing.[1] It is a patent fact that a religion has never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the waking-consciousness, the intellectual man, it threw new light on another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity, resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great personality — the "it," the race, the cosmic force bound up in that personality — has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training) and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples. It is not "the" truth or "the" good or "the" upright, but "the" Roman or "the" Puritan or "the" Prussian that is a fact. The sum of honour and duty, discipline, resolution, is a thing not learned from books, but awakened in the stream of being by a living exemplar; and that is why Frederick William I was one of those educators, great for all time, whose personal race-forming conduct does not vanish in the course of the generations. The genuine statesman is distinguished from the "mere politician" — the player who plays for the pleasure of the game, the arriviste on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and rank — as also from the schoolmaster of an ideal, by the fact that he dares to demand sacrifices — and obtains them, because his feeling that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands, transforms them to the core, and renders them capable of deeds to which otherwise they could never have risen.[2]
- ↑ See p. 341.
- ↑ The same, too, holds good of the Churches, which are different in kind from the Religion — namely, elements of the world of facts and, therefore, political and not religious in the type of their leadership. It was not the Christian evangel, but the Christian martyr, who conquered the world, and that which gave him his strength was not the doctrine, but the example, of the Man on the Cross.
