chel_ represents the German nation as an honest, blunt, unsuspicious
fellow, who easily allows himself to be imposed upon, even, he adds,
with a touch of patriotism, "by those who are greatly his inferiors in
point of strength and real worth."]

The same remark is applicable to them which Dr. Johnson made of a
court-martial in which he had little confidence, summoned to decide a
very important case. He said that perhaps there was not a member of
it who, in the whole course of his life, had ever spent an hour by
himself in balancing probabilities.[1] Can any one imagine that the
tailor and the tanner would be impartial judges? What! the vicious
multitude impartial! as if partiality were not ten times more to be
feared from men of the same class as the accused than from judges who
knew nothing of him personally, lived in another sphere altogether,
were irremovable, and conscious of the dignity of their office. But
to let a jury decide on crimes against the State and its head, or on
misdemeanours of the press, is in a very real sense to set the fox to
keep the geese.

[Footnote 1: Boswell's _Johnson_, 1780, set. 71.]

Everywhere and at all times there has been much discontent with
governments, laws and public regulations; for the most part, however,
because men are always ready to make institutions responsible for the
misery inseparable from human existence itself; which is, to speak
mythically, the curse that was laid on Adam, and through him on the
whole race. But never has that delusion been proclaimed in a more
mendacious and impudent manner than by the demagogues of the
_Jetstzeit_--of the day we live in. As enemies of Christianity, they
are, of course, optimists: to them the world is its own end and
object, and accordingly in itself, that is to say, in its own natural
constitution, it is arranged on the most excellent principles, and
forms a regular habitation of bliss. The enormous and glaring evils of
the world they attribute wholly to governments: if governments, they
think, were to do their duty, there would be a heaven upon earth; in
other words, all men could eat, drink, propagate and die, free from
trouble and want. This is what they mean when they talk of the world
being "its own end and object"; this is the goal of that "perpetual
progress of the human race," and the other fine things which they are
never tired of proclaiming.

Formerly it was _faith_ which was the chief support of the throne;
nowadays