es
of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims
and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under
the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in
the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
some shrewd provision fo