dealistic phrase with its realistic
content.

To his party, the party of man, or the crowd of humanity in Germany,
the State builder Karl Heinzen offers the "best republic," the best
republic devised by him, "the federal republic with social
institutions." Rousseau once sketched the best political world for the
Poles and Mably for the Corsicans. The great Genevese citizen has
found a still greater successor.

"I submit that just as a flower can only be made out of petals, so a
republic can only be composed of republican elements." A man who knows
how to make flowers out of petals, even if it is only a daisy, cannot
fail to devise the best republic, whatever an ill-natured world might
say.

In spite of all slanderous tongues, the brave state builder takes the
example of the Charter of Republican North America. What seems
offensive to him, he brushes aside with his common sense. Thus he
accomplishes a revised edition--in _usum delphini_, that is for the
use and edification of "German humanity." The colossal picture of the
world devised by him he has in fact hung up with his own hand on the
highest summit of the Swiss Alps.

_Cacatum non est pictum_, hisses the voice of the "small" impenitent
snake. And the republican Ajax angrily lets the communistic Thersites
fall to the ground, and blurts out in a deep-throated voice the
fearful words: "You carry the ridiculous too far, Mr Engels!"

And really, Mr Engels? Do you not believe that the American federal
system is the best political form which statecraft has so far devised?
You shake your head? What? You deny that the American federal system
has ever been devised by statecraft at all? And that there are "best
political social forms" _in abstracto_? But that is the last straw.

You are shameless enough to point out to us that the honest German who
would benefit his true fatherland by conferring on it the North
American constitution, beautified and improved, resembles the idiotic
merchant who copied the ledgers of his rich rival, and imagined that
being in possession of this copy, he had also come into possession of
the coveted wealth.

Barbaroux, and other persons who had made much noise in the world,
were made shorter by a whole head because they happened to claim the
"American federal system" to be the "best political form." And thus it
will befall all other Goliaths to whom it may occur, in the midst of
any democratic revolution in Europe, and especially in still