[p. 484]
|484| capacity to judge and to do what would be conducive to his private welfare, as well as its belief in universal shamelessness; it can therefore hope for no living activity, no support from his self-feeling.
There lies in this a difference too great to be grasped by the statesman who takes into account only what can be calculated in determinate numbers, a difference which shows itself first of all in the prosperity, the well-being, the uprightness and contentment of the inhabitants of the one state, as well as in the dullness, the eternal turning over of baseness into impudence, and the poverty of the other, which, in the greatest things, where only the contingent side of the event lies on the outside, makes precisely this contingency determinate and necessary.
The difference is infinite whether public power so arranges itself that everything on which it can count is in its hands, but for that very reason can count on nothing further, or whether, besides what is in its hands, it can count also [on] the free attachment, the self-feeling and the own endeavour of the people — an omnipotent, unconquerable spirit, which that hierarchy has driven away, and which has its life only where the supreme public power leaves as much as possible to the citizens’ own care. What kind of leathery, spiritless life will be produced in such a modern state, in which everything is regulated from above downwards and nothing that has a general side is left to the administration and execution of the parts of the people that are interested in it — as the French republic has made itself — is, if this tone of the pedantry of ruling can continue, to be learned only in the future; but what life and what aridity prevails in another, equally regulated state, the Prussian, strikes everyone who enters the first village of it, or sees its complete lack of scientific and artistic genius, or does not regard its strength
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