THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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colonial slaves by the export of spirits, and those against the proletariat at home by means of chloroform. This is that level­headed technology of the millennium which a
stirred bourgeoisie bequeathed to the social democracy of all countries. Without the millennium having come noticeably closer which Galsworthy rightly misses in the
London slums. The wolf assumes grandmother's voice, the crocodile sheds tears, the Gestapo practises Winter Aid,* Wall Street fights for the free nations. And an
untold number of petit bourgeois, who have not learned anything from experience, and also living intellectually from hand to mouth, still believe, almost more than ever,
in the lies, clichés and distortions which were not only invented by the old fascism but which a new fascism, with the same goal, is increasing by its so­called Atlantic
freedom. And what is liberally stale has now become totally perverted and poisonous, so that here the difference between west and east is falsely changed from that
between capital and work into one between alleged freedom and alleged constraint. This kind of thing sees itself supported by a social democracy of soft Henrys who
are not at all so soft when it comes to shooting at those for whom freedom is no cliché and revolution is no snail. All these alleviations of misery stifle the awareness of
misery and of that which will change it, especially in its urban morass. A proven contribution to this is also the inner life, the wholly unpolitical one, which the sons and
daughters of the educated classes, above all in Germany, have cultivated for so long and have so abruptly paid for. The leisure which they had to some extent in
advance of the workers, and the bit of light which the habit of education could have bestowed, thus itself turned into a fund to increase their own ignorance and to
support the general ignorance. These average educated people were very often and very gladly familiar with a Galsworthy or his other European relatives, but they had
hardly heard the name of an Engels,and in the case of Marx they could only think of the line: a political song is a nasty song, † or the maxim that nobody is perfect. This
kind of thing did not even belong to the momentary shooting stars let alone to the fateful starry hours of humanity in which educated people, who like fools are always
with us, took delight. Thus all the social workers and other organizations had a clear conscience about begging from door to door and in the street, they developed it
themselves and had it developed for them. Until the greatest alleviation of misery was called Hitler and spoke more than ever of spiritual values.
* A relief organization for the needy in winter during the Nazi period.
† A bourgeois cliché after Brander in Goethe's Faust, Part I, 2092.