Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

THE TRUE GLORY OF NATIONS.231

Athens was but a speck upon earth, yet it became the sun of ancient civilisation ; and while it shone in all its brightness, how many nations, powerful by their numbers and extensive territory, lived, fought, conquered, exhausted themselves, and died, uselessly and obscurely ! What would have become of Germany under the system of a conquering policy ? And yet, notwithstanding its divisions, notwithstanding the weakness, as regards physical resources, of the little states that compose it, Germany, with its poets, its thinkers, its learned men, its differing forms of government, its republics, and its princes, not rivals in power, but in mental culture, in moral elevation, in sagacity of thought, is, at least, on a level, in general civilisation, with the most advanced countries in the world.

It is not by covetously looking beyond themselves that a people acquire a right to the gratitude of mankind, but by turning their strength upon themselves in order to become all that they are capable of being, in the double relations of mental and physical regeneration. This species of merit is as superior to the propagandise of the sword as virtue is to glory.

A power of the first rank: that stale expression, applied to politics, will long continue to cause the misery of the world. Self-love is the most common principle in man: and for this very reason the God who founded his doctrine on humility is the only true God, considered even in the light of a sound policy; for he alone has foreseen the path of indefinite progress, of a progress altogether intellectual, or internal: and yet, for eighteen hundred years the world has doubted his words; but, doubted and discussed as they are,