lican youth.[1] Or are we in this respect deceived by the same error which we find in Madame Roland, who bewails so bitterly in her Memoirs that there was not among the men of her time one of importance? The worthy lady did not know her own greatness, nor did she observe that her contemporaries were indeed great enough when they were in nought inferior to her as regards intellectual stature. The whole French people has to-day grown so mightily that we are perhaps unjust to its public representatives, who do not rise so markedly from the mob, yet who are not on that account to be considered as small. We cannot see the forests for the trees.[2] In Germany we see the country, a terrible jungle of scraggy thicket and dwarf pines, and here and there a giant oak, whose head rises to the clouds while down below the worms do gnaw its trunk.
To-day is the result of yesterday. We must find out what the former would ere we can find what it is the latter will have. The Revolu-
- ↑ This admirable sentence, in which the conception of imperium in imperio is so ingeniously paraphrased, is given rather feebly in French as "en sorte qu'ils formaient dans l'histoire de la revolution la temps héroïque."
- ↑ "Man kann jetzt vor lauter Wald die Bäume nicht sehen," a common German saying; in English, "He cannot see the wood for the leaves;" in French, "Tout étant devenu haute futaie il est impossible d'y distinguer les arbres isolé,"—Translator.
