"ONLY IN VIRTUE, UNITY."
"Our days demand a decision for the law which God has written in flaming characters in the hearts of his men. Prepare yourselves! decide for life and for death!
"Open nightly profligacy is not the corruption which rages in our blood, but vice devours around him only the more hideously under the mantle of an accustomed pious politeness: falsehood masks itself under a thousand assumed holy forms; and the condition of the people should be the blossom of so many sacrifices, and is the state of the old miserable laxity.
"Half-accomplished fools, and the stunted overwise, for ever deride the truth, which unadorned and simple, throws itself on the human mind, and they cripple and distort her use in life. The moral strength of the Germans is split on the Babel of foreign affectation, and keeps itself no longer in the house-life. The will is wanting in us for the deed. The Fatherland fails the youth. Courtiers and money-service rule, instead of that honour-firm integrity which has resigned itself to the influence of time, and is become mouldy in it.
"The virtue of the burger class bends itself servilely at the nod of the great, and rushes, with already gripped clutch, at the gold-bag. The idleness of servants devours our bones; courage and hero-mind display themselves alone in paper panoply amongst the whole people in empty vapouring; and since they glow not as pure flames in every heart, we find them not even in ourselves.
"Deep based on equally vile sentiments in the people, stands the most sensual government; and unrestrained arbitrary power needs no other protection than these;--the separation fraternal hearts by the means of jealously-guarded frontiers, of the leading-strings of strict and public surveillance; of cradle-songs, and the sermons of sloth; and it rests itself as upon very sufficient props, on the wages and the oaths of police and soldiers. Many amongst the great German people may stand far before me; but I also hate nothing more than the cowardice and effeminacy of this day. I must give an example of this. I must proclaim myself against this laxity; and I know nothing nobler to achieve than to strike down the arch-slave, and great advocate of this mercenary time, the corrupter and betrayer of my people--August von Kotzebue!
"Thou, my German People, exalt thyself, to a higher moral worth of manhood; of the free spirit of man, and his creative strength! My German People! thou hast no realler nor nobler possession; it is thy highest good. Honour, guard this faith--this thy love to God. Let thy sanctuary no more be trodden under foot.
"Man, be he born in the most miserable and abject condition, is created to become an image of God. Rely on the promised Christian freedom. Honour and trust only the free man. Detest the traitors, the slaves in soul, the false teachers, who will not have this. Hate the dastardly poets of half-measures, the preachers of cowardice, the hirelings who hold thee back from every bold enterprise. Detest and murder all those who lift themselves so high in their villanous and despotic fancies that they forget the godlike in thee, and hold and drive thee, the mad multitude, in their high-wise hands, as a complex wheel.
"Free conscience! free speech! Man shall solace himself at his own free pleasure in the divine light, of which the fountain is in him. He shall strive after the highest discoveries, and shall be able, unburdened by those of others, to prove and build up his own convictions. But man also shall verify these opinions; he shall live and act; he shall exercise his divine creative power--his will, and shall make it availing. It is for this that we have received the whole might of will--not that we may suffer others to decide what they please concerning us, as over a piece of a field, but that in every condition of life we may determine for ourselves; and therein all virtue demonstrates itself--that we, in every thing which concerns the people, shall take a lively interest, and so act upon our own resolves, each as we will, and not as another compels.
"Finally, make free your wills!