The result was that the enemies of the Republic ceased fighting against it, as such, and helped to sub¬ jugate those who were themselves also enemies of the Republic, if for very different reasons. A further result was that all danger that the adherents of the old State might put up a fight against the new one was averted for good.
If we consider how the Revolution was able— quite apart from the faults in the old State, which were the cause of it—to be successful when it came to the point, we arrive at the following conclusion :
- It was due to the deadening of our conceptions of duty and obedience, and 2. To the timorous passiveness of the Parties who are supposed to maintain our State.
The first was at bottom due to our wholly non¬ national and purely State education. From this came the misconception of means and ends. Consciousness and fulfilment of duty, and obedience are not ends in themselves—no more than that the State is an end in itself, but they should all be means for making possible and assuring the existence of a community, living a life spiritually and physically similar.
MY STRUGGLE 21 I The Revolution succeeded because our people, or rather our governments, had lost all true feeling for these conceptions, so that they had become weak, formal and doctrinaire.
As regards the second point, the bourgeois Parties, which may be termed the only political formations existing under the old State, were convinced that they ought to urge their views solely by intellectual methods, since physical methods belonged to the State alone. This was senseless at a period when a political adversary had long discarded that point of view, and was declar¬ ing with complete frankness that it meant, if it could, to attain its political ends by force.
The political programme of the bourgeois Parties rested on the past, in so far as they had not already become reconciled to the new state of affairs ;