The disturbance of the equipoise of his own faculties makes the individual man miserable; the inequality of citizens, the inequality of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
Not inequality of goods,—for the majority of voices and fists on the part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,—but inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The Lex agraria in the fields of science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common garden, all nations have become stronger.—Unequal cultivation chains the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron hollow-head[[292]] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a hollow-head of another kind.
With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth, culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest rainy months of humanity—which always fell upon the time of national transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy days—have spent themselves.
One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the hours of light,—War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained material for only forty-three eruptions more,—so might one also reckon the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an equal measure of electric matter.
All nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral—and physical—development be shortened one half.
With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now to send to Asia nothing but a—compositor; the conqueror grafts, the author sows.
It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice, nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national deceptions,—e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days, unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[[293]]
The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with the valleys in a common plain.
From all this follows:—
There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because they will find it easier to live indeed,—when men will have, not more pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse), but more virtue,—when the people Will take part in thinking, and the thinker—in working,[[294]] in order that he may save himself the need of Helots,—when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot island of St. Helena[[295]] there are no storms.