mes political power, that revolutionary boldness which hurls at
the opponent the defiant words: I am nothing, and I have to be
everything. But the stock-in-trade of German morality and honour, not
only as regards individuals but also as regards classes, constitutes
rather that modest species of egoism which brings into prominence its
own limitations.

The relation of the various spheres of German society is therefore not
dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to
press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself
oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its
co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its
part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German
middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general
representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes.

Consequently it is not only the German kings who succeed to the throne
_mal a propos_, but it is every sphere of bourgeois society which
experiences its defeat before it celebrates its victory, develops its
own handicaps before it overcomes the handicaps which confront it,
asserts its own narrow-minded nature before it can assert its generous
nature, so that even the opportunity of playing a great part is always
past before it actually existed, and each class, so soon as it embarks
on a struggle with the class above it, becomes involved in a struggle
with the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself
fighting the monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the
nobility, the bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the
proletariat is already commencing to fight the bourgeois.

The middle class hardly dares to seize hold of the ideas of
emancipation from its own standpoint before the development of social
conditions and the progress of political theory declare this
standpoint to be antiquated, or at least very problematical. In France
partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In
Germany universal emancipation is the _conditio sine qua non_ of every
partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany it is
the impossibility of gradual emancipation which must bring forth
entire freedom. In France every popular class is tinged with political
idealism, and does not feel primarily as a particular class, but as
the representative of social needs generally. The role of emancipator,
therefo