Political Considerations of Vienna Period
politician, but will become a reformer if he has the stuff for it.
Any other attitude, particularly in Germany, would lead to catastrophe.
In studying the Pan-German movement and its struggle against Rome, I came at that time, and increasingly as the years went on, to the following belief:
This movement’s slight realization of the importance of the social problem cost it the truly able-bodied fighting masses of the people; its entrance into Parliament deprived it of its mighty impetus, and infected it with all the weaknesses peculiar to that institution; its struggle against the Catholic Church made it impossible in many lower and middle-class groups, and thus robbed it of many of the best elements the nation can call its own.
The practical result of the Austrian Kulturkampf was close to zero.
They did succeed in wresting about a hundred thousand members from the Church, but without even inflicting any particular damage. The Church had in this case really no need to shed tears over the lost sheep; for what it lost it had inwardly long since ceased fully to possess. Here was the difference between the new Reformation and the old one: during the former, many of the Church’s best had turned away as a matter of religious conviction, whereas now only the naturally lukewarm departed, and this from “considerations” of a political nature.
But precisely from the political standpoint the result was as sorry as it was ridiculous.
Once again a promising movement toward political salvation for the German nation had gone to pieces because, not being conducted with the necessary ruthless clear-sightedness, it lost itself in directions which were bound to divide its force.
For one thing is surely true: the Pan-German movement would never have made this mistake if it had sufficiently understood the native character of the broad masses. If its leaders had known that to succeed at all one must, for purely human reasons, never show two or more adversaries to the masses, because then the fighting force is completely split up—if they had realized
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