On the King of Prussia and Social Reform - Page 2

"fears" to the King. For the moment only this need be said: the revolt was directed not immediately against the King of Prussia, but against the bourgeoisie. As an aristocrat and an absolute monarch, the King of Prussia can have no love for the bourgeoisie; he can have even less cause for apprehension when their submission and their impotence are heightened by a strained and difficult relation to the proletariat. Further: the orthodox catholic regards the orthodox protestant with more hostility than the atheist, just as the legitimist regards the liberal with greater hostility than the communist. Not because atheists and communists are related to the catholic and legitimist, but because they are more alien to him than the protestant and the liberal, because they are outside his circle. As a politician, the King of Prussia finds his immediate antagonism in politics, in liberalism.

For the King, the antagonism of the proletariat exists just as little as the King exists for the proletariat. The proletariat must attain to decisive power before it can extinguish antipathies and political antagonisms, and draw upon itself the whole enmity of politics. Lastly: it must even afford a delightful surprise to the well-known character of the King, thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that "interesting" and "much celebrated" pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed his "own" Royal Prussian pauperism.

Our "Prussian" is even more unlucky when he denies "religious feeling" to be the source of the Royal Cabinet Order.

Why is not religious feeling the source of this Cabinet Order? Because it is a "very sober" expression of Christian statecraft, a "sober" expression of the doctrine which places no difficulties in the way of the acceptance of its own medicine: the good feeling of Christian hearts.

Is not religious feeling the source of Christian statecraft?

Is not a doctrine which possesses its panacea in the good feeling of Christian hearts based on religious feelings? Does a sober expression of religious feeling cease to be an expression of religious feeling? In fact, it must be a religious feeling greatly infatuated with itself and very intoxicated which would seek in the "unity of Christian hearts the remedy for great evils" which it denies can be supplied by the State and the authorities. It must be a very intoxicated religious feeling which, according to "Prussian's" admission, finds the entire evil to consist in the lack of Christian sentiment, and consequently refers the authorities to the sole means of strengthening this sentiment, to "exhortation." According to "Prussian," Christian feeling is the object at which the Cabinet Order aims. When it