254 REY. TV. R. IXGE, D.D,, ON FREEDOM AXD DISCIPLINE. 



or of classes, by simply condemning the rebels to exclusion from 

 its organization — that is to say, to banishment or starvation. 

 It would be a tremendous tyranny, but it might be a magni- 

 ficently ordered scientific State. Xow this ideal does not appeal 

 to our contemporaries for its own sake. To the masses it is 

 abhorrent, not only in England, but to a less extent even in 

 Germany. It is interesting, and a little surprising to us who 

 regard Grermany as wholly Prussianized, to read statements 

 like the following from Eudolf Eucken : " Hard and soft periods 

 are apt to alternate. To-day softness is undoubtedly pre- 

 dominant and tends to give rise to the idea that the weak are 

 good and the strong bad, and that it is the duty of the latter to 

 give way to the former the moment there is a conflict of interests. 

 Thus there is a widespread modern tendency to take sides with 

 the child against the parent, with the pupil against the teacher, 

 and in general with those in subordination against those in 

 authority, as if all order and all discipline were a mere demon- 

 stration of selfishness and brutality." This might well have 

 been written by an Englishman — we should recognize its truth 

 at once if it were said of our own country. That it is possible 

 for a very clear-sighted German observer to say it of his country- 

 men proves that we have to deal, not with an idiosyncrasy of 

 English sentimentalism, but with a tendency which is common 

 to the whole of the European world. This " softness " is, 

 quite plainly, the ethical sentiment of the proletariat, which has 

 become articulate as soon as this class succeeded to political 

 power. Eucken, who regards the vogue of Nietzsche as a 

 \^olent protest against the flaccidity and colourlessness which 

 must pervade social life if this sentimental equalization of the 

 imequal should carry the day, goes on to deprecate not less 

 strongly what he calls 'politidsin — ^the undue increase in the po\s er 

 of the State, in consequence of which, he says, " the whole of 

 spiritual life tends to fall more and n:ore under the power of the 

 State, and to receive as it were an oflScial stamp." This is an 

 evil to which we are entirely strangers. It has come upon 

 Germany not because it is part of the spirit of the age, but as 

 a necessary result of bitter national rivalries. If we become a 

 socialistic State, it will be because we feel our existence threatened 

 by another nation, or by sectional anarchism at home. It 

 may be that the spirit of nationalism will end in a victory for 

 State-socialism everwhere — such a form of government is the 

 logical outcome of fierce and aggressive patriotism in any 



