affection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
Kaiser, a plebiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
through the rod."

And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of
the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is
still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_.
"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it
is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have
elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a
land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.

If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
should get the answer, timid and naive but at the same time the
deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land
where there are no longer any rich.

A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
be _only_ poor, only very poor, people.

Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.

Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyho