Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/22

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PREFACE TO THE PREFACE.

You vainly endeavour to degrade the friends of the Fatherland and their principles in public opinion by crying the latter down as French Revolutionary doctrines, and the former as the French party in Germany; for you always speculate on what is worst in the German people, on national hatred, religious and political superstitions, and especially on stupidity. But you do not know that Germany can be no longer deceived by the old tricks, that even the Germans have observed that national hatred is only a means whereby one nation may be made to enslave another, and especially that there are now no longer nations in Europe, but only two parties, of which the one, called Aristocracy, dreams itself privileged by birth to usurp all the distinguished privileges of the citizen-class, while the other, known as Democracy, vindicates its inalienable human rights, and will do away with privilege of birth in the name of reason. Indeed, you should call us the Heavenly, not the French party, for that declaration of human rights on which our whole political economy is based is not derived from France, where they were certainly and naturally most gloriously proclaimed; not at all from America, whence Lafayette brought them; but from Heaven, the eternal Fatherland of Reason.

How detestable and deadly must the word