Chapter II: The State

....[F]or the present day teacher of political [science] there is less obligation to truth than bondage to a definite purpose. And the purpose is: preservation at any price of the current monstrosity of human mechanism, now called the state. We have no call to be surprised if in the discussion of this problem practical criteria are avoided as much as possible, and instead the professors dig themselves into a hodgepodge of 'ethical,' 'moral,' and other ideal values, tasks and aims.

In general three conceptions [of the state] can be distinguished:

(a) The troop of those who regard the state simply as a more or less voluntary grouping of people under a governmental power....

(b) The second group of people [are] those who at least attach a few conditions to the existence of the state. They desire not only uniform but also, if possible, uniform language - if only for general technical reasons of administration....

(c) The third group is...regards the state as a means for the realization of usually very unclearly conceived aims of a state--people linguistically stamped and united. The will for a uniform state language is here expressed, not only in the hope of giving this state a foundation capable of supporting an outward increase of power, but not less in the opinion - basically erroneous, incidentally - that this will make it possible to carry through a nationalization in a definite direction.

In the last hundred years it has been a true misery to observe how these circles, sometimes in the best good faith, played with the word 'Germanize.' I myself still remember how in my youth this very term led to incredibly false conceptions.... Even in Pan-German circles the opinion could then be heard that the Austrian-Germans with the promotion and aid of the government, might well succeed in a Germanization of the Austrian Slavs; these circles never even began to realize that Germanization can only be applied to soil and never to people. For what was generally understood under this word was only the forced outward acceptance of the German language. But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language in the future and perhaps even give his vote to a German political party. That any such Germanization is in reality a de-Germanization never became clear to our bourgeois national world. For if today, by forcing a universal language on them, obvious differences between different peoples are bridged over and finally effaced, this means the beginning of a bastardization, and hence in our case not a Germanization but a destruction of the Germanic element. Only too frequently does it occur in history that conquering people's outward instruments of power succeed in forcing their language on oppressed peoples, but that after a thousand years their language is spoken by another people, and the victors thereby actually become the vanquished.

Since nationality or rather race does not happen to lie in language but in the blood, we would only be justified in speaking of a Germanization if by such a process we succeeded in transforming the blood of the subjected people. But this is impossible. Unless a blood mixture brings about a change, which, however, means the lowering of the level of the higher race. The final result of such a process would consequently be the destruction of precisely those qualities which had formerly made the conquering people capable of victory. Especially the cultural force would vanish through a mating with the lesser race, even if the resulting mongrels spoke the language of the earlier, higher race a thousand times over. For a time, a certain struggle will take place between the different mentalities, and it may be that the steadily sinking people, in a last quiver of life, so to speak, will bring to light surprising cultural values. But these are only individual elements belonging to the higher race, or perhaps bastards in whom, after the first crossing, the better blood still predominates and tries to struggle through; but never final products of a mixture. In them a culturally backward movement will always manifest itself....

How terrible is the damage indirectly done to our Germanism today by the fact that, due to the ignorance of many Americans, the German-jabbering Jews, when they set foot on American soil, are booked to our German account. Surely no one will call the purely external fact that most of this lice-ridden migration from the East speaks German a proof of their German origin and nationality.

What has been profitably Germanized in history is the soil which our ancestors acquired by the sword and settled with German peasants. In so far as they directed foreign blood into our national body in this process, they contributed to that catastrophic splintering of our inner being which is expressed in German super-individualism - a phenomenon, I am sorry to say, which is praised in many quarters.

Also in this third group, the state in a certain sense still passes as an end in itself, and the preservation of the state, consequently, as the highest task of human existence.

In summing up we can state the following: All these views have their deepest root, not in the knowledge that the forces which create culture and values are based essentially on racial elements and that the state must, therefore, in the light of reason, regard its highest task as the preservation and intensification of the race, this fundamental condition of all human cultural development....

It is, therefore, the first obligation of a new movement, standing on the ground of a folkish world view, to make sure that its conception of the nature and purpose of the state attains a uniform and clear character.

Thus the basic realization is: that the state represents no end, but a means. It is, to be sure, the premise for the formation of a higher human culture, but not its cause, which lies exclusively in the existence of a race capable of culture. Hundreds of exemplary states might exist on earth, but if the Aryan culture-bearer died out, there would be no culture corresponding to the spiritual level of the highest peoples of today. We can go even farther and say that the fact of human state formation would not in the least exclude the possibility of the destruction of the human race, provided that superior intellectual ability and elasticity would be lost due to the absence of their racial bearers.

If today, for example, the surface of the earth were upset by some tectonic event and a new Himalaya rose from the ocean floods, by one single cruel catastrophe the culture of humanity would be destroyed. No state would exist any longer, the bands of all order would be dissolved, the documents of millennial development would be shattered - a single great field of corpses covered by water and mud. But if from this chaos of horror even a few men of a certain race capable of culture had been preserved, the earth, upon settling, if only after thousands of years, would again get proofs of human creative power. Only the destruction of the last race capable of culture and its individual members would desolate the earth for good. Conversely, we can see even by examples from the present that state formations in their tribal beginnings can, if their racial supporters lack sufficient genius, not preserve them from destruction. Just as great animal species of prehistoric times had to give way to others and vanish without trace, man must also give way if he lacks a definite spiritual force which alone enables him to find the necessary weapons for his self -preservation....

The state in itself does not create a specific cultural level; it can only preserve the race which conditions this level. Otherwise the state as such may continue to exist unchanged for centuries while, in consequence of a racial mixture which it has not prevented, the cultural capacity of a people and the general aspect of its life conditioned by it have long since suffered a profound change. The present-day state, for example, may very well simulate its existence as a formal mechanism for a certain length of time, but the racial poisoning of our national body creates a cultural decline which even now is terrifyingly manifest.

Thus, the precondition for the existence of a higher humanity is not the state, but the nation possessing the necessary ability.

This ability will fundamentally always be present and must only be aroused to practical realization by certain outward conditions. Culturally and creatively gifted nations, or rather races, bear these useful qualities latent within them, even if at the moment unfavorable outward conditions do not permit a realization of these latent tendencies. Hence it is an unbelievable offense to represent the Germanic peoples of the pre-Christian era as 'cultureless,' as barbarians. That they never were. Only the harshness of their northern homeland forced them into circumstances which thwarted the development of their creative forces. If, without any ancient world, they had come to the more favorable regions of the south, and if the material provided by lower peoples had given them their first technical implements, the culture-creating ability slumbering within them would have grown into radiant bloom just as happened, for example, with the Greeks. But this primeval culture-creating force itself arises in turn not from the northern climate alone. The Laplander, brought to the south, would be no more culture-creating than the Eskimo. For this glorious creative ability was given only to the Aryan, whether he bears it dormant within himself or gives it to awakening life, depending whether favorable circumstances permit this or an inhospitable Nature prevents it.

From this the following realization results:

The state is a means to an end. Its end lies in the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures. This preservation itself comprises first of all existence as a race and thereby permits the free development of all the forces dormant in this race. Of them a part will always primarily serve the preservation of physical life, and only the remaining part the promotion of a further spiritual development. Actually the one always creates the precondition for the other.

States which do not serve this purpose are misbegotten, monstrosities in fact. The fact of their existence changes this no more than the success of a gang of bandits can justify robbery.

We National Socialists as champions of a new philosophy of life must never base ourselves on so-called 'accepted facts' - and false ones at that. If we did, we would not be the champions of a new great idea, but the coolies of the present-day lie. We must distinguish in the sharpest way between the state as a vessel and the race as its content. This vessel has meaning only if it can preserve and protect the content; otherwise it is useless.

Thus, the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom.

But what they try to palm off on us as a state today is usually nothing but a monstrosity born of deepest human error, with untold misery as a consequence.

We National Socialists know that with this conception we stand as revolutionaries in the world of today and are also branded as such. But our thoughts and actions must in no way be determined by the approval or disapproval of our time, but by the binding obligation to a truth which we have recognized. Then we may be convinced that the higher insight of posterity will not only understand our actions of today, but will also confirm their correctness and exalt them.

From this, we National Socialists derive a standard for the evaluation of a state. This value will be relative from the standpoint of the individual nationality, absolute from that of humanity as such. This means, in other words:

The quality of a state cannot be evaluated according to the cultural level or the power of this state in the frame of the outside world, but solely and exclusively by the degree of this institution's virtue for the nationality involved in each special case....

Hence, if we propound the question of how the state which we Germans need should be constituted, we must first clearly understand what kind of people it is to contain and what purpose it is to serve.

Our German nationality, unfortunately, is no longer based on a unified racial nucleus. The blending process of the various original components has advanced so far that we might speak of a new race. On the contrary, the poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people, especially since the Thirty Years' War, have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.... [T]he German people lack that sure herd instinct which is based on unity of the blood and, especially in moments of threatening danger, preserves nations from destruction in so far as all petty inner differences in such peoples vanish at once on such occasions and the solid front of a unified herd confronts the common enemy.... If the German people in its historic development had possessed that herd unity which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe. World history would have taken a different course, and no one can distinguish whether in this way we would not have obtained what so many blinded pacifists today hope to gain by begging, whining, and whimpering: a peace, supported not by the palm branches of tearful, pacifist female mourners, but based on the victorious sword of a master people, putting the world into the service of a higher culture....

For detrimental as it was on the one hand that a complete blending of our original racial components did not take place, and that the formation of a unified national body was thus prevented, it was equally fortunate on the other hand that in this way at least a part of our best blood was preserved pure and escaped racial degeneration.... Today we know that a complete intermixture of the components of our people might, in consequence of the unity thus produced, have given us outward power, but that the highest goal of mankind would have been unattainable, since the sole bearer, whom Fate had clearly chosen for this completion, would have perished in the general racial porridge of the unified people.

But what, through none of our doing, a kind Fate prevented, we must today examine and evaluate from the standpoint of the knowledge we have now acquired.

Anyone who speaks of a mission of the German people on earth, must know that it can exist only in the formation of a state which sees its highest task in the preservation and promotion of the most noble elements of our nationality, indeed of all mankind, which still remain main intact.

Thus, for the first time the state achieves a lofty inner goal. Compared to the absurd catchword about safeguarding law and order, thus laying a peaceable groundwork for mutual swindles, the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission.

From a dead mechanism which only lays claim to existence for its own sake, there must be formed a living organism with the exclusive aim of serving a higher idea.

The German Reich as a state must embrace all Germans and has the task, not only of assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements in this people, but slowly and surely of raising them to a dominant position.

Thus, a condition which is fundamentally one of paralysis is replaced by a period of struggle, but as everywhere and always in this world, here, too, the saying remains valid that 'he who rests - rusts,' and, furthermore, that victory lies eternally and exclusively in attack. The greater the goal we have in mind in our struggle, and the smaller the understanding of the broad masses for it may be at the moment, all the more gigantic, as the experience of world history shows, will be the success - and the significance of this success if the goal is correctly comprehended and the struggle is carried through with unswerving perseverance....

.... we can establish the following valid statement: Every racial crossing leads inevitably sooner or later to the decline of the hybrid product as long as the higher element of this crossing is itself still existent in any kind of racial unity. The danger for the hybrid product is eliminated only at the moment when the last higher racial element is bastardized.

This is a basis for a natural, even though slow, process of regeneration, which gradually eliminates racial poisonings as long as a basic stock of racially pure elements is still present and a further bastardization does not take place....

.... Yet the danger is very great that the man who has once grown blind will keep tearing down the racial barriers more and more, until at length even the last remnant of his best part is lost. Then in reality there remains nothing but a unified mash, such as the famous world reformers of our days idealize; but in a short time it would expel all ideals from this world. Indeed: a great herd could be formed in this way; a herd beast can be brewed from all sorts of ingredients, but a man who will be a culture-bearer, or even better, a culture-founder and culture-creator, never arises from such a mixture. The mission of humanity could then be looked upon as finished.

Anyone who does not want the earth to move toward this condition must convert himself to the conception that it is the function above all of the Germanic states first and foremost to call a fundamental halt to any further bastardization.

The generation of our present notorious weaklings will obviously cry out against this, and moan and complain about assaults on the holiest human rights. No, there is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings.

A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.

The protest against this on so-called humane grounds is particularly ill-suited to an era which on the one hand gives every depraved degenerate the possibility of propagating, but which burdens the products themselves, as well as their contemporaries, with untold suffering, while on the other hand every drug store and our very street peddlers offer the means for the prevention of births for sale even to the healthiest parents. In this present-day state of law and order in the eyes of its representatives, this brave, bourgeois-national society, the prevention of the procreative faculty in sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis, hereditary diseases, cripples, and cretins is a crime, while the actual suppression of the procreative faculty in millions of the very best people is not regarded as anything bad and does not offend against the morals of this hypocritical society, but is rather a benefit to its short-sighted mental laziness.....

The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation. Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit. It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice. Conversely, it must take care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not limited by the financial irresponsibility of a state regime which turns the blessing of children into a curse for the parents. It must put an end to that lazy, nay criminal, indifference with which the social premises for a fecund family are treated today, and must instead feel itself to be the highest guardian of this most precious blessing of a people. Its concern belongs more to the child than to the adult.

Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children. In this the folkish state must perform the most gigantic educational task. And some day this will seem to be a greater deed than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era. By education it must teach the individual that it is no disgrace, but only a misfortune deserving of pity, to be sick and weakly, but that it is a crime and hence at the same time a disgrace to dishonor one's misfortune by one's own egotism in burdening innocent creatures with it; that by comparison it bespeaks a nobility of highest idealism and the most admirable humanity if the innocently sick, renouncing a child of his own, bestows his love and tenderness upon a poor, unknown young scion of his own nationality, who with his health promises to become some day a powerful member of a powerful community. And in this educational work the state must perform the purely intellectual complement of its practical activity. It must act in this sense without regard to understanding or lack of understanding, approval or disapproval.

A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only six hundred years, would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune' but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable. If the fertility of the healthiest bearers of the nationality is thus consciously and systematically promoted, the result will be a race which at least will have eliminated the germs of our present physical and hence spiritual decay.

For once a people and a state have started on this path, attention will automatically be directed on increasing the racially most valuable nucleus of the people and its fertility, in order ultimately to let the entire nationality partake of the blessing of a highly bred racial stock....

In the folkish state finally, the folkish philosophy of life must succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men no longer are concerned with breeding dogs, horses, and cats, but in elevating man himself, an age in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, the other joyfully sacrifices and gives....

If as the first task of the state in the service and for the welfare of its nationality we recognize the preservation, care, and development of the best racial elements, it is natural that this care must not only extend to the birth of every little national and racial comrade, but that it must educate the young offspring to become a valuable link in the chain of future reproduction.

And as in general the precondition for spiritual achievement lies in the racial quality of the human material at hand, education in particular must first of all consider and promote physical health; for taken in the mass, a healthy, forceful spirit will be found only in a healthy and forceful body. The fact that geniuses are sometimes physically not very fit, or actually sick, is no argument against this. Here we have to do with exceptions which - as everywhere - only confirm the rule. But if the mass of a people consists of physical degenerates, from this swamp a really great spirit will very seldom arise. In any case his activity will not meet with great success. The degenerate rabble will either not understand him at all, or it will be so weakened in will that it can no longer follow the lofty flight of such an eagle.

Realizing this, the folkish state must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary. And here again, first must be taken by the development of character, especially the promotion of willpower and determination, combined with the training of joy in responsibility, and only in last place comes scientific schooling.

Here the folkish state must proceed from the assumption that a man of little scientific education but physically healthy, with a good, firm character, imbued with the joy of determination and willpower, is more valuable for the national community than a clever weakling. A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed they will not even be able to safeguard their existence on this earth....

Physical training in the folkish state, therefore, is not an affair of the individual, and not even a matter which primarily regards the parents and only secondly or thirdly interests the community; it is a requirement for the self-preservation of the nationality, represented and protected by the state. Just as the state, as far as purely scientific education is concerned, even today interferes with the individual's right of self-determination and upholds the right of the totality toward him by subjecting the child to compulsory education without asking whether the parents want it or not - in far greater measure the folkish state must some day enforce its authority against the individual's ignorance or lack of understanding in questions regarding the preservation of the nationality. It must so organize its educational work that the young bodies are treated expediently in their earliest childhood and obtain the necessary steeling for later life. It must above all prevent the rearing of a generation of hothouse plants.

This work of care and education must begin with the young mother. Just as it became possible in the course of careful work over a period of decades to achieve antiseptic cleanliness in childbirth and reduce puerperal fever to a few cases, it must and will be possible, by a thorough training of nurses and mothers themselves, to achieve a treatment of the child in his first years that will serve as an excellent basis for future development.

The school as such in a folkish state must create infinitely more free time for physical training. It is not permissible to burden young brains with a ballast only a fraction of which they retain, as experience shows, not to mention the fact that as a rule it is unnecessary trifles that stick instead of essentials, since the young child cannot undertake a sensible sifting of the material that has been funneled into him. If today, even in the curriculum of the secondary schools, gymnastics gets barely two hours a week and participation in it is not even obligatory, but is left open to the individual, that is a gross incongruity compared to the purely mental training. Not a day should go by in which the young man does not receive one hour's physical training in the morning and one in the afternoon, covering every type of sport and gymnastics. And here one sport in particular must not be forgotten, which in the eyes of many 'folkish' minded people is considered vulgar and undignified: boxing. It is incredible what false opinions are widespread in 'educated' circles. It is regarded as natural and honorable that a young man should learn to fence and proceed to fight duels right and left, but if he boxes, it is supposed to be vulgar! Why? There is no sport that so much as this one promotes the spirit of attack, demands lightning decisions, and trains the body in steel dexterity. It is no more vulgar for two young men to fight out a difference of opinion with their fists than with a piece of whetted iron. It is not less noble if a man who has been attacked defends himself against his assailant with his fists, instead of running away and yelling for a policeman. But above all, the young, healthy body must also learn to suffer blows. Of course this may seem wild to the eyes of our present spiritual fighters. But it is not the function of the folkish state to breed a colony of peaceful aesthetes and physical degenerates. Not in the respectable shopkeeper or virtuous old maid does it see its ideal of humanity, but in the defiant embodiment of manly strength and in women who are able to bring men into the world....

Particularly our German people which today lies broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world, needs that suggestive force that lies in self-confidence. This self-confidence must be inculcated in the young national comrade from childhood on. His whole education and training must be so ordered as to give him the conviction that he is absolutely superior to others. Through his physical strength and dexterity, he must recover his faith in the invincibility of his whole people. For what formerly led the German army to victory was the sum of the confidence which each individual had in himself and all together in their leadership. What will raise the German people up again is confidence in the possibility of regaining its freedom. And this conviction can only be the final product of the same feeling in millions of individuals.

Immense was the collapse of our people, and the exertion needed to end this misery some day will have to be just as immense. Anyone who thinks that our present bourgeois education for peace and order will give our people the strength some day to smash the present world order, which means our doom, and to hurl the links of our slavery into the face of our enemies, is bitterly mistaken. Only by superabundance of national willpower, thirst for freedom, and highest passion, will we compensate for what we formerly lacked.

The clothing of our youth should also be adapted to this purpose. It is truly miserable to behold how our youth even now is subjected to a fashion madness which helps to reverse the sense of the old saying: 'Clothes make the man' into something truly catastrophic.

Especially in the youth, dress must be put into the service of education. The boy who in summer runs around in long stovepipe trousers, and covered up to the neck, loses through his clothing alone a stimulus for his physical training. For we must exploit ambition and, we may as well calmly admit it, vanity as well. Not vanity about fine clothes which everyone cannot buy, but vanity about a beautiful, well-formed body which everyone can help to build.

This is also expedient for later life. The girl should get to know her beau. If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bowlegged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible. This, too, is in the interest of the nation: that the most beautiful bodies should find one another, and so help to give the nation new beauty.

Today, of course, all this is more necessary than ever, because there is no military training, and so the sole institution is excluded which in peacetime compensated at least in part for what was neglected by the rest of our educational system. And there, too, success was to be sought, not only in the training of the individual as such, but in the influence it exerted on the relations between the two sexes. The young girl preferred the soldier to the non-soldier....

The folkish state must not only carry through and supervise physical training in the official school years; in the post-school period as well it must make sure that, as long as a boy is in process of physical development, this development turns out to his benefit....

In what form the state carries on this training is beside the point today; the important thing is that it should do so and seek the ways and means that serve this purpose. The folkish state will have to look on post-school physical training as well as intellectual education as a state function, and foster them through state institutions. This education in its broad outlines can serve as a preparation for future military service. The army will not have to teach the young men the fundamentals of the most elementary drill-book as hitherto, and it will not get. recruits of the present type; no, it will only have to transform a young man who has already received flawless physical preparation into a soldier.

In the folkish state, therefore, the army will no longer have to teach the individual how to walk and to stand; it will be the last and highest school of patriotic education. In the army the young recruit will receive the necessary training in arms, and at the same time he will receive a further moulding for any other future career. But in the forefront of military training will stand what has to be regarded as the highest merit of the old army: in this school the boy must be transformed into a man; in this school he must not only learn to obey, but must thereby acquire a basis for commanding later. He must learn to be silent not only when he is justly blamed but must also learn, when necessary, to bear injustice in silence.

Furthermore, reinforced by faith in his own strength, filled with the force of a commonly experienced esprit de corps, he must become convinced of the invincibility of his nationality....

Analogous to the education of the boy, the folkish state can conduct the education of the girl from the same viewpoint. There, too, the chief emphasis must be laid on physical training, and only subsequently on the promotion of spiritual and finally intellectual values. The goal of female education must invariably be the future mother....

The crown of the folkish state's entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity. Thus the groundwork is created by preserving the racial foundations of our nation and through them in turn securing the basis for its future cultural development.

For all physical and all intellectual training would in the last analysis remain worthless if it did not benefit a being which is ready and determined on principle to preserve himself and his special nature.

Otherwise that would occur which we Germans even now must greatly deplore, though perhaps the full extent of this tragic misfortune has hitherto not been realized: that in the future we remain nothing out cultural fertilizer, not only in the limited conception of our present bourgeois view, which regards an individual national comrade lost as nothing more than a lost citizen, out with the painful realization that in this event, despite all our knowledge and ability, our blood is nevertheless doomed to decline. By mating again and again with other races, we may raise these races from their previous cultural level to a higher stage, out we will descend forever from our own high level.

For the rest this education, too, from the racial viewpoint, must find its ultimate completion in military service. And in general, the period of military service must be regarded as the conclusion of the average German's normal education.

Important as the type of physical and mental education will be in the folkish state, equally important will be the human selection as such....

It goes without saying that in the totality of a nation's population talents will be found for every possible domain of daily life. It is furthermore obvious that the value of knowledge will be the greater, the more the dead knowledge is animated by the relevant talent in the individual. Creative achievements can only arise when ability and knowledge are wedded.

The boundless sins of present-day humanity in this direction may be shown by one more example. From time to time illustrated papers bring it to the attention of the German petty-bourgeois that some place or other a Negro has for the first time become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor, in fact a heroic tenor, or something of the sort. While the idiotic bourgeoisie looks with amazement at such miracles of education, full of respect for this marvelous result of modern educational skill, the Jew shrewdly draws from it a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the equality of men that he is trying to funnel into the minds of the nations. It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions. For this is training exactly like that of the poodle, and not scientific 'education.' The same pains and care employed on intelligent races would a thousand times sooner make every single individual capable of the same achievements.

But intolerable as this state of affairs would be if it ever consisted of anything but exceptions, equally intolerable is it today in places where it is not talent and inborn gifts that decide who is chosen for higher education. Yes, indeed, it is an intolerable thought that every year hundreds of thousands of completely ungifted people are held worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands with great talent remain deprived of higher education. The loss which the nation thereby suffers is inestimable. If in the last decades the wealth of important inventions has increased amazingly, especially in North America, it is not least because there materially more talents from the lowest classes find opportunity for higher education than is the case in Europe.

For invention, drilled knowledge does not suffice, but only knowledge animated by talent. But in our country today no store is set on this; it is only good marks that matter....

Let it not be said that this is an ideal condition which this world will not tolerate in practice and will actually never achieve.

We are not simple enough, either, to believe that it could ever be possible to bring about a perfect era. But this relieves no one of the obligation to combat recognized errors, to overcome weaknesses, and strive for the ideal. Harsh reality of its own accord will create only too many limitations. For that very reason, however, man must try to serve the ultimate goal, and failures must not deter him, any more than he can abandon a system of justice merely because mistakes creep into it, or any more than a medicament is discarded because there will always be sickness in spite of it.

Care must be taken not to underestimate the force of an idea. I should like to remind those who become faint-hearted in this connection - in case they were ever soldiers - of a time whose heroism represented the most overpowering proof of the force of idealistic motives. For what made men die then was not concern for their daily bread, but love of the fatherland, faith in its greatness, a general feeling for the honor of the nation. It was when the German people moved away from these ideals to follow the material premises of the revolution, and exchanged their arms for knapsacks, that they arrived, not at the earthly paradise, but at the purgatory of general contempt and, no less, of general misery.

Therefore it is really necessary to confront the master bookkeepers of the present material republic by faith in an ideal Reich.