ld be the class of emancipation par excellence, another class must contrariwise be the class of [34]manifest subjugation. The negative-general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy was the condition of the positive-general significance of the class of the bourgeoisie, which was immediately encroaching upon and confronting the former.

But in Germany every class lacks not only the consistency, the keenness, the courage, the ruthlessness, which might stamp it as the negative representative of society. It lacks equally that breadth of soul which would identify it, if only momentarily, with the popular soul, that quality of genius which animates material power until it becomes political power, that revolutionary boldness which hurls at the opponent the defiant words: I am nothing, and I have to be everything. But the stock-in-trade of German morality and honour, not only as regards individuals but also as regards classes, constitutes rather that modest species of egoism which brings into prominence its own limitations.

The relation of the various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the [35]conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes.

Consequently it is not only the German kings who succeed to the throne mal à propos, but it is every sphere of bourgeois society which experiences its defeat before it celebrates its victory, develop