Munich
life, smothering the virtues of idealism, the state has collapsed again, soon carrying its economic life with it into the game.
If we ask ourselves what the state-building or merely preservative forces really are, we can lump them all in one category; ability and willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole. These virtues have nothing whatever to do with economics, as we can see from the simple fact that man never sacrifices himself for economics; that is, people die not for business but only for ideals. Nothing showed the Englishman’s superiority of psychological insight into the soul of the people more clearly than the motivation he succeeded in giving to his struggle. While we were battling for bread, England was fighting for “freedom,” and not even for her own—no, for that of the little nations. We laughed at this impudence, or were annoyed at it, and thus showed the thoughtless stupidity into which so-called German statesmanship had fallen even before the war. There was no longer the faintest notion of the nature of that force which can lead men to die of their own free will and determination.
So long as the German people in 1914 still believed it was fighting for ideals, it held out; when it was told to fight simply for its daily bread, it preferred to give up.
Our intelligent “statesmen” were astonished at this change in feeling. They never understood that from the moment a man begins to fight for an economic interest he shuns death, which would prevent him forever from enjoying the reward of his struggle. To save her own child, the most delicate mother becomes a heroine; in all ages, the battle for the preservation of the species and of the hearth (or the state) that shelters it has alone driven men upon the spears of their enemies.
We may propound the following as an eternal truth:
No state has ever yet been founded by peaceful economy, but only by the instincts that preserve the species, whether they take the form of heroic virtue or crafty cunning; the former produces Aryan, working, civilized states, the latter Jewish parasite colonies. But when these instincts in a people or a state be-
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