[p. 462]
|462| leaves a semblance of union, just as fallen fruits are recognised as having still belonged to their tree by the fact that [they] lie beneath its crown; but [neither] the place beneath it nor its shadow, which touches them, saves them from rot and from the power of the elements to which they now belong.
The health of a state reveals itself in general not so much in the calm of peace as in the movement of war; the former is the condition of enjoyment and of activity in separation, the government a wise domestic paternalism that demands only the ordinary of the governed; in war, however, is shown the strength of the connection of all with the whole, how much of them the state has set itself up to be able to demand, and how much avails what they may do for it out of their own drive and heart.
Thus in the war with the French republic Germany has experienced in itself that it is no longer a state, and has become aware of its political condition both in the war itself and in the peace which ended this war and whose palpable results are: the loss of some of the fairest German lands, of some millions of its inhabitants, a burden of debt on the southern half heavier than on the northern, which prolongs the misery of the war far into the peace, and that, besides those who have come under the dominion of the conquerors and at the same time of foreign laws and customs, many states will still lose what is their highest good, – to be states of their own.
But what the inner causes, the spirit of these results may be, how they are only its external and necessary appearances – to such a reflection the peace is suited, just as this reflection is in itself worthy of everyone who does not surrender himself to what happens, but cognises the event and its necessity and through such cognition distinguishes himself from those who, for the sake of their vanity,
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