Causes of the Collapse
the training of will and determination. Its products were really not strong men, but the docile “Polymaths” which we Germans before the war were generally considered to be, and accordingly were rated as. The German was popular, because he was very useful, but he was little respected, precisely on account of his weak will. Not for nothing was he the quickest of almost all peoples to lose nationality and Fatherland. The apt proverb, “He who travels hat in hand goes the whole width of the land,” tells the entire story.
But this docility became positively fatal when it determined the fashion in which alone it was permissible to deal with the Monarch. Good form accordingly demanded that one never contradict, but approve anything and everything His Majesty deigned to please. But here was the very place where free, manly dignity was most necessary, or else the institution of Monarchy was bound some day to be destroyed by such fawning; for fawning it was, and nothing more. Only sorry sycophants and turnspits—in short, the whole decadent crew that had always felt more comfortable at All Highest thrones than frank and decently honorable souls had—could consider this the sole proper form of intercourse with the wearer of a crown. It must be said that with all their humility toward their Lord and meal-ticket these “humble servants” of majesty have always displayed the greatest boldness toward the rest of mankind, particularly when they chose to display themselves to the other sinners as sole and exclusive “monarchists”; this is a piece of genuine impertinence which only an ennobled or perhaps an unennobled mawworm would be capable of! for in reality these fellows have always been the grave-diggers of monarchy and particularly of the monarchical idea. Nor is anything else thinkable; a man who is ready to stand up for his cause can and will never be a skulking, characterless sycophant. A man who is really serious about preserving and fostering an institution will cling to it with every fiber of his heart, and will never get over it if it begins to show any faults. Nor will he, however, shout through the streets as the democratic “friends” of the Monarchy did, acting in equally
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