I'he Days of a Man 1:1912 



Concerning Bernhardi's utterances, I made at the 

 time the following notes: 



According to the Hegelian view of the State, as expressed by 

 Bernhardi, this spiritual collective personality exists in a moral 

 vacuum, having the right to control the conscience and acts of 

 individuals, thus occupying the exact position once held by the 

 medieval Church. In so far as this philosophy is accepted, the 

 Reformation of Luther and his contemporaries merely trans- 

 ferred spiritual control from the infallible Church to the 

 infallible State. 



The essence of tyranny, under whatever name it be known — 

 paternalism, ecclesiasticism, autocracy, oligarchy — is the 

 forcible suppression of the individual and the control of his acts 

 and opinions by some power outside himself which promotes 

 efficiency through enforced cooperation. Some day a reforma- 

 tion as radical as that which freed men from the tyranny of the 

 Church will release them from the tyranny of the State. As the 

 terrible wars for religion in the seventeenth century took from 

 ecdesiasticism the power to make war, it may be that some 

 future holocaust will be needed to divest the State of its most 

 dangerous attribute. 



A toast to At a banquet given to Roosevelt in San Francisco 

 Roosevelt jj^ 191 2, responding to a toast to the honored guest, 

 I jocosely compared him with Thomas Jefferson, "the 

 Theodore Roosevelt of a hundred years ago," to 

 whose eager interest in the great West we owed the 

 explorations of Lewis and Clark. I also likened him 

 to Arthur Young, the noted traveler who in the 

 eighteenth century gave such a vivid picture of 

 feudal France. "Were it in my power," exclaimed 

 Young, "I would make those great lords skip again!" 

 Roosevelt had tried to do the same with certain 

 lords of American finance, I said, and with such 



C 418 3 



