Mein Kampf
To anyone who objects that under such conditions scarcely anyone will be willing to devote himself to so risky an undertaking, there is but one answer: thank God. It is the very purpose of a Germanic democracy to keep every chance unworthy climber from attaining the government of his fellow-man through the back door; the greatness of the responsibility to be assumed is meant to scare off weaklings and incompetents.
But if such a fellow should try to steal in nevertheless, we can more easily find and harshly rebuke him: Away, craven scoundrel! Draw back your foot; you are befouling the stair. The front steps to the Pantheon of history are not for skulkers, but for heroes!
I had arrived at this opinion after two years of visiting the Vienna Parliament. Then I stopped going.
Parliamentary government had been quite largely responsible for the ever-increasing weakness of the old Hapsburg state during the previous few years. The more its work broke German supremacy, the more a system of playing off nationalities against one another gained ground. In the Reichsrat itself this was always at the expense of the Germans, and thus eventually at the expense of the Empire; for by the turn of the century it must have been obvious to any simpleton that the centripetal force of the Monarchy could no longer overcome the countries’ attempt to break loose. On the contrary, the more pitiful the means which the state had to use for self-preservation, the more universally the state was despised. Not only in Hungary but in the individual Slavic provinces people identified themselves so little with the common Monarchy that they did not feel its weakness as a shame to themselves. Instead they were rather pleased at the signs of senility, for they preferred the Monarchy’s death to its recovery.
In Parliament, complete collapse was prevented by ignominious yielding and by paying every sort of blackmail (of course the Germans had to foot the bill); in the country it was prevented by adroit playing-off of one people against another. But
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