Who shall break the idols? Who shall open the eyes of their fanatical followers? Who shall make them understand that no god of their minds, religious or secular, has the right to force himself on other human beings—even he who seems the most worthy—or to despise them. Admitting that your Kultur on German soil produces the sturdiest and most abundant human crop, who has entrusted to you the mission of cultivating other lands? Cultivate your own garden. We will cultivate ours. There is a sacred flower for which I would give all the products of your artificial culture. It is the wild violet of Liberty. You do not care about it. You tread it under foot. But it will not die. It will live longer than your masterpieces of barrack and hot-house. It is not afraid of the wind. It has braved other tempests than that of to-day. It grows under brambles and under dead leaves. Intellectuals of Germany, intellectuals of France, labour and sow on the fields of your own minds: respect those of others. Before organising the world you have enough to do to organise your own private world. Try for a moment to forget your ideas and behold yourselves. And above all, look at us. Champions of Kultur and of Civilisation, of the Germanic races and of Latinity, enemies, friends, let us look one another in the eyes. My brother, do you not see there a heart similar to your own, with the same hopes, the same egoism, and the same heroism and power of dream which for ever refashions its gossamer web. “Vois-tu pas que tu es moi,” said the old Hugo to one of his enemies. The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the centre of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with his own; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike arc fed. Intelligence of the mind is nothing without that of the heart. It is nothing also without good sense and humour—good sense which shews to every people and to every being their place in the universe—and humour which is the critic of misguided reason, the soldier who following the chariot to the Capitol reminds Caesar in his hour of triumph that he is bald.
