y over the
minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided;
the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various
interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets
free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on
hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it
be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they
please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on
demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered
and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every
occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on
the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is
not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib
tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.

To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it
cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been
demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit
which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial
barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the
Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of
education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in
ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of
syntax.

When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a
common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign
at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of
capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and
the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the
productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.

Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be
graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by
separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered
body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.

Any one who does not accept this self-cr