It is a question of choosing between the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above; I choose that which comes from above, because it comes from cleaner and more serene regions. It is a question of choosing, finally, between the dictatorship of the dagger and the dictatorship of the sword; I choose the dictatorship of the sword, because it is nobler. Gentlemen, in voting we will divide ourselves on this question, and in dividing ourselves we will be consistent with ourselves. You, gentlemen, will vote, as always, for what is most popular; we, gentlemen, will, as always, vote for what is most salutary.

But America has so many problems! No, she doesn’t. America has only one problem: America is a communist country. And has been since before you were born. And probably before your mother was born. Earl Browder was right: communism is as American as apple pie. Russia didn’t infect America. America infected Russia.

WHO ARE THE AMERICANS?

THE question asked of Communists more frequently than any other, if we can judge from the Hearst newspapers, is this:

"If you don't like this country, why don't you go back where you came from?"

The truth is, if you insist on knowing, Mr. Hearst, we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country. Our affection is all the more deep in that we have watered it with the sweat of our labor—labor which made this country what it is; our mothers nourished it with the tears they shed over the troubles and tragedies of rearing babies in a land controlled by profit and profit-makers. If we did not love our country so much, perhaps we would surrender it to Wall Street.

Of course when we speak of our love of America, we mean something quite different from what Mr. Hearst is speaking about in his daily editorial diatribes. We mean that we love the masses of the toiling people. We find in these masses a great reservoir of all things admirable and lovable, all things that make life worth living. We are filled with anger when we see millions of these people whom we love being degraded, starved, oppressed, beaten and jailed when they protest. We have a deep and moving hatred of the system, and of those who fatten on the system which turns our potential paradise into a living hell.

We are determined to save our country from the hell of capitalism. And most of us were born here, so Hearst's gag is not addressed to us anyway. But workers in America who happen to have been born abroad are just as much Americans as anybody else. We all originated across the waters, except perhaps a tiny minority of pure-blooded American Indians. The foreign-born workers have worked harder for less wages on behalf of this country than anybody else. They deserve, at a minimum, a little courtesy from those who would speak of Americanism. There is less historical justification in America than perhaps in any other major country for that narrow nationalism, that chauvinism, which makes a cult of a "chosen people."

We in America are a mongrel breed and we glory in it. We are the products of the melting pot of a couple of hundred nationalities. Our origin as a nation acknowledged its debt to a Polish Kosciusko, a German Von Steuben, a French Lafayette and countless other "foreigners."

Furthermore, let's be careful not to get snooty about pedigrees; half the names in the American social register were originally borne by men who were transported from Europe after conviction of crime or who in the new country became bold bandits and buccaneers. It was the more aggressive and violent types who rose to the top most quickly in our early days and laid the foundations of the great American fortunes. They were the Al Capones of their day, with no income-tax department to bring them to grief.

We love the past history of America and its masses, in spite of the Astors and Vanderbilts. We find in it a wealth of tradition striped in the purple tints of glory—the glory of men and women fighting fearlessly and self-sacrificingly against the throttling hand of a dead past, for those things upon which further progress depended.

Around the birth of our country as an independent nation cluster such heroic names as those of Patrick Henry, whose famous shout, "As for me, give me liberty or give me death!" re-echoes down the corridors of time; of Thomas Paine, whose deathless contribution to our national life of a militant anti-clericalism has long survived the many pamphlets with which he fought, the form of which alone belongs to a past age; of Thomas Jefferson, whose favorite thought revolved about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants (he thought this "natural manure" should be applied to the tree about every twenty years!); of all the founding fathers, whose chief claim to glory lies in their "treason" to the "constitutional government" of their day, and among whom the most opprobrious epithet was "loyalist."

These men, in their own time, faced the issues of their day, cut through the red tape of precedent, legalism and constitutionalism with a sword, made a revolution, killed off a dying and outworn system, and opened up a new chapter in world history.

Our American giants of 1776 were the "international incendiaries" of their day. They inspired revolutions throughout the world. The great French Revolution, the reverberations of which filled Europe's ears during the entire nineteenth century, took its first steps under the impulse given by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was for that time what The Communist Manifesto is for ours. Copy all the most hysterical Hearst editorials of today against Moscow, Lenin, Stalin; substitute the words America, Washington, Jefferson; and the result is an almost verbatim copy of the diatribes of English and European reactionary politicians in the closing years of the eighteenth century against our American founding fathers. Revolution was then "an alien doctrine imported from America" as now it is "imported from Moscow."

After the counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton had been victorious and established itself under the Constitution in 1787, a period of reaction set in. There was, as in our modern days since the World War, a period marked by oppressive legislation which went down in history as the "Alien and Sedition Laws." But the American masses had not been mastered; those who rode high and mighty with their eighteenth-century counterparts of criminal syndicalism laws, deportations, Palmers, Dicksteins and McCormicks, were driven out of power in a struggle, often bloody and violent, which again for a period placed the representatives of the masses (then predominantly agrarian) in control of government.

The greatest figure of them all in the American tradition, Abraham Lincoln, became great because he, despite his own desire to avoid or compromise the struggle, was forced by history to lead to victory a long and bloody civil war whose chief historical significance was the wiping out of chattel slavery, the destruction of private property rights in persons, amending the Constitution in the only way it has ever been fundamentally amended. Lincoln's words, which still live today among the masses, are those which declared:

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

These words of Lincoln are but a paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence. Our national holiday, July 4, is in memory of that immortal document of American history. The very heart of the Declaration, that which gives it life, without which all else becomes empty phrases, are these lines, the memory of which had grown dim until the Communists rescued them from the dust of libraries:

"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.... When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [the masses] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security."

This is the heart of the American tradition. Without this revolutionary kernel, the whole history of the origin of our country becomes only the strutting of marionettes and stuffed shirts, the spread-eagle oratory of the Fourth of July under imperialism, the vulgar yappings of the Hearst press. Without this, patriotism becomes—as that acid critic of the British bourgeoisie, Dr. Johnson, described it—the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says—slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses.

We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.

We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.

That does not mean, of course, that we Communists raise the slogan of "Back to 1776." Such reactionary stupidity was committed by the LaFollette "third party" movement in 1924, typical as that movement was of a class grouping (petty bourgeoisie refusing to ally with workers) that had lost its historically progressive significance. That was no more in the spirit of our revolutionary forefathers than it would have been for the Declaration of Independence to proclaim, "Back to the Republic of Rome." To each day its own task; that of 1776 was to free a rising capitalism from the fetters of a dying feudal system, enabling it to expand the productive forces of mankind to a new high level; that of today is to free these tremendous productive forces created by capitalism, which are now being choked and destroyed because they have grown too big to live longer under capitalist property relations.

Americanism, in this revolutionary sense, means to stand in the forefront of human progress. It means never to submit to the forces of decay and death. It means constantly to free ourselves of the old, the outworn, the decaying, and to press forward to the young, the vital, the living, the expanding. It means to fight like hell against those who would plow under the crops in our fields, who would close down and scrap our factories, who would keep millions of willing toilers, anxious to create the good things of life, living like beggars upon charity.

Americanism, as we understand it, means to appropriate for our country all the best achievements of the human mind in all lands. Just as the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence had been nurtured upon the French Encyclopedists and the British classical political economists, so the men who will write our modern declaration of independence of a dying capitalist system must feed themselves upon the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the modern representatives of human progress.

In the words of a famous American whose memory we love, we say to Mr. Hearst and all the Red-baiting cohorts of Wall Street: "If this be treason, make the most of it."

This is how we American Communists read the history of our country. This is what we mean by Americanism. This is how we love our country, with the same burning love which Lenin bore for Russia, his native land. Like Lenin, we will fight to free our land from the blood-sucking reactionaries, place it in the hands of the masses, bring it into the international brotherhood of a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and realize the prophetic lines of Walt Whitman:

"We have adhered too long to petty limits... the time has come to enfold the world."

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD:

The first provocation came from the British. The Stamp Act, passed by Parliament in 1765, required revenue stamps for commercial and legal documents, liquor licenses, pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs, and other items of commerce, with heavy fines and forfeitures for infractions of the law. Outcries followed immediately. From James Otis in Massachusetts to Patrick Henry in Virginia it was denounced as tyranny, and a new Stamp Act Congress composed of delegates from nine of the thirteen colonies issued a declaration of rights and grievances. In Boston a young attorney named John Adams wrote a series of articles in the Boston Gazette that were later consolidated into an essay published in 1765. Anyone expecting no more than a protest against an onerous tax from the legal-minded, secular Adams would be surprised. The essay, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law," reads like a Puritan sermon—which, in a way, it was. Reaching back into the Middle Ages, Adams describes how "the Romish clergy" persuaded the faithful to entrust them with the keys of heaven, and how they allied themselves with feudal lords, who kept people "in a servile state of dependence," bound to follow them "to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance." This unholy alliance between "the two systems of tyranny" lasted for centuries; "one age of darkness succeeded another." Adams ignores the frequent quarrels between church and state in the Middle Ages; there is no mention of the famous struggle between England's Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket that culminated in Becket's assassination. In Adams's version of history there was a perfect weld between a tyrannical church and a tyrannical state—until "God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation."

So it was the Reformation, not the Renaissance, that ended the Middle Ages. The revival of classical learning and the beginnings of modern science appeared while Europe was still entirely Catholic—and that would not fit Adams's story line. In his account, the "wicked confederacy" of Catholicism and feudal law had to be broken up before any progress could be made. In England Adams credits the Puritans for doing it. These "men of sense and learning" stood up against papal-feudal alliance, and "it was this great struggle that peopled America." Adams acknowledges that religion was one of the reasons for the Puritan migration but "it was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed." It was "a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America." Adams thus transforms the Puritans into whigs, making them champions not alone of religious purity but of liberty and republican government.

Adams now trains the full force of his rhetoric upon Great Britain. Britain, he charges, is trying to deprive us of our foundational freedoms, the freedoms that our Puritan fathers came to this country to uphold. The Stamp Act is part of a larger plot to bring canon and feudal law to these shores: "A design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanack and a newspaper, with restraints and duties; and to introduce the inequalities and dependencies of the feudal system, by taking from the poorer sort of people all their little subsistence, and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors, and their deputies." In sum, the Stamp Act is popish because the pope likes to keep people in darkness and ignorance, and it is feudal because it takes money from the poor and gives it to a privileged class.

Blaming the pope for the Stamp Act is quite a stretch, but stretching was not unusual during the run-up to the Revolution. In 1768 John Adams's cousin Samuel Adams wrote a series of articles in the Boston Gazette, signed "A Puritan," in which he claimed to detect agents of "popery" everywhere in America: "The more I know of the circumstances of America, I am sorry to say it, the more reason I find to be apprehensive of POPERY." The articles then lay out the body of evidence of Catholic influence—which turns out to be a farrago of insinuations, suspicions, and hearsay accounts of a secret visit by a priest to Salem, someone in York wearing a crucifix, someone else in Hatfield uttering expressions that "seemed at least too much to savor of POPERY."

As the clock ticked down to 1776 the colonists began wondering aloud whether the Antichrist of St. John's Revelation, already ensconced in Rome and Paris, might be opening a branch office in London. Among the so-called "Intolerable Acts" passed by Parliament in 1774, one of the most intolerable was the Quebec Act, which claimed for the British Crown a large stretch of territory west of the Alleghenies formerly belonging to France, to which several of the colonies laid claim. In accordance with previous French practice, there was to be no elected assembly and therefore no privilege of self-taxation, and all Catholics were to enjoy religious toleration. Leading colonists saw the hand of the Beast of Rome in all of this, the dead giveaway being its toleration of Catholicism—"the establishment of popery," as Samuel Sherwood put it.

Sherwood, a great-nephew of Jonathan Edwards and one of the most widely quoted ministers of the Revolutionary War period, delivered a sermon in 1776, The Church's Flight into the Wilderness, before an audience that included John Hancock. In it, Sherwood observed that in recent years the Catholic Church "has not been confined to the boundaries of the Roman empire, nor strictly to the pope's usurped authority and jurisdiction." This, Sherwood held, was foretold in Revelation, where it was predicted that the Antichrist, "in one shape and form, and another, was to have a very extensive spread and influence, not only thro' the territories of papal Rome, but thro' all the nations and kingdoms of the world in general." In recent years it spread to France, and whether or not it now applies to Britain as well "I cannot positively determine." But in view of the fact that the ministry and Parliament "appears so favorable to popery and the Roman catholic interest . . . it need not appear strange or shocking to us, to find that our own nation has been, in some degree, infected and corrupted therewith, and that some of our princes and chief rulers have had a criminal converse and familiarity with the old mother of harlots."

Sherwood was still calling Great Britain "our own nation," but by now the expression was all but meaningless, for the whole drift of his sermon was that America was a special nation, one that had successfully freed itself from the clutches of the Old World. There is a whore in Revelation, but also a very holy woman, a woman "whose dress was the sun and who had the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head." In Catholic tradition the woman is often identified with the Blessed Mother, but in Protestantism she represents the true Christian church, the church persecuted by the Antichrist. The woman, who is about to give birth, moans in pain, and in chapter 12 of Revelation, the Antichrist, "a huge red dragon," stands before the woman, waiting for the child to be born so that "he might devour her son." But the son, who was later to rule all nations, was immediately caught up to heaven. The woman then "fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that there they may nourish her a thousand two hundred and sixty days." For any of his listeners who still didn't get it, Sherwood makes it clear that the church's "wilderness" refuge is America. He rejects the views of those who would interpret "wilderness" to mean a place of peril, danger, and affliction. No, this wilderness is a beautiful place, or has become so. It was an uncultivated wilderness, "but it soon, by the blessing of heaven on their labour and industry, became a pleasant field or garden, and has been made to blossom like the rose." The very land of America has become Edenic. "Our crops of all kinds have become plentiful. Our fruit-trees loaded with fruit and pressed down with their burdens. Our granaries are full." The "howling wilderness," of earlier Puritan rhetoric has given way to lush imagery anticipating the "fruited plains" and "amber waves of grain" in Catherine Lee's Bates's "America the Beautiful" of 1893. Sherwood could easily have joined Bates in declaring that "God shed his grace" on America. His own language carries the same idea: "The American quarter of the globe seemed to be reserved in providence as a fixed and settled habitation for God's church, where she might have property of her own, and the right of rule and government, so as not to be controul'd and oppressed in her civil and religious liberties, by the tyrannical and persecuting powers of the earth, represented by the red dragon."

Earlier I distinguished between premillennialism and postmillennialism, the former holding that Christ's Second Coming would occur before the thousand years of peace, the latter envisaging his reappearance after the world gradually prepares for it over a thousand-year period. As we saw, premillennialism is the more "apocalyptic," in the common meaning of the term. It suggests a sudden cataclysm coming in the near future, a time of wrath and judgment. Postmillennialism, by contrast, implies a long, peaceful spiritual development of humanity here on earth. Sherwood seems inclined toward this more irenic form of millennialism. America is a beautiful and abundant garden. Only at the end of a long period of time will the wheat be ready to be separated from the tares. In the meantime, God has designated this land as the great testing ground for his design.

What saves Sherwood's millennial patriotism from curdling into chauvinism is the anxious note he adds toward the close of the sermon. While on the one hand, "we see abundant cause for thanksgiving, and praise to our almighty preserver," on the other hand we see "the greatest reason for the deepest humiliation, repentance, and contrition of heart, for our vile abuse and misimprovement of these privileges and favors. . . . What awful backsliding and declensions in this land, once dedicated to the Lord as a mountain of holiness, and an habitation of righteousness, liberty and peace?" If America is a beautiful land, it is no thanks to most of its unworthy inhabitants: "How has the beauty of this pleasant land of Immanuel been defaced, and its glory spoiled by the little foxes treading down our tender vines; and by the inroads of the wild boar in the wilderness?" It was a familiar sermonic theme, the jeremiad, still functioning, as it had in the previous century, as a reminder of the community's holy mission and an exhortation to remain faithful to it.

Here was the anxious conscience of Puritanism, always warning of the dangers of collective sinfulness, of "corruption." The term was broad enough to include a whole palette of vices, from bribery and avarice to dissipation, extravagance, and foppery. Harvard president Samuel Langdon, who had served as a chaplain of one of the regiments that had captured Louisbourg in 1745, made corruption the theme of an election-day sermon he delivered before the third Provincial Congress in 1775. Beginning with ancient Israel, he notes how corruption, by the time of Jeremiah, had caused the Hebrews to lose sight of their God and their religion; in consequence, just as Jeremiah predicted, God "in his righteous judgment, left them to run into all this excess of vice, to their own destruction." Then Langdon moves on to Great Britain. As with Israel, its laws once were equitable and just—but no more. The British nation is now "a mere shadow of its ancient political system,—in titles of dignity without virtue,—in vast public treasures continually lavished in corruption till every fund is exhausted . . .—in the many artifices to stretch the prerogatives of the crown beyond all constitutional bounds, and make the king an absolute monarch, while the people are deluded with a mere phantom of liberty." But Langdon does not stop there. He wants his listeners to face some hard facts about their suffering nation. If Israel and Britain suffered God's wrath because of their sins, what about America?

"Have not the sins of America, and of New England in particular, had a hand in bringing down upon us the righteous judgments of Heaven? Wherefore is all this evil come down upon us? Is it not because we have forsaken the Lord? . . . Have we not lost much of that genuine Christianity which so remarkably appeared in our ancestors, for which God distinguished them with the signal favors of providence when they fled from tyranny and persecution into this western desert? Have we not departed from their virtues?"

Langdon goes down the list of vices—pride, luxury, profaneness, intemperance, unchastity, love of pleasure, fraud, avarice, flattery, bribery—finding them among all ranks of Americans, and ends with a passionate plea: "My brethren, let us repent and implore the divine mercy; let us amend our ways and our doings . . . and thus obtain the gracious interpositions of Providence for our deliverance." Here it was, right in the middle of an especially militant sermon: an anxious reckoning of America's own sins. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that this ambivalent note, calling at once for action and for reflection, appeared in American patriotic rhetoric.

The thought of bequeathing these words to the world of today and tomorrow has not arisen owing to my withdrawal from public life, but rather because of the voice which has attached to the former standing of the Austrian Empire the erroneous designation of a system under the address of my name.

The title “Political Testament” which I give to these pages may be adequate to mark the course which I hold in view for this record.

The position of a man who himself laid hands on events differs by its nature from that of the historian who chronicles and weighs events according to their worth or lack of it. The former takes on the liability for his deeds, the latter only the responsibility for his judgement.

The materials for the correct view of events lie not merely in the success or failure of the undertakings. Awareness of the situation, in which these undertakings had their grounds, forms an important element of history.

Here the archives alone are the sources for the necessary clarification, but precisely therefore is the situation of the men who provide the materials for the facts that shape history likewise very different from that of the historians.

The former are not able to elude the control which lies in the archives. Only a few ministers have held their ground through so long a course of time, as my official work spanned, in a constantly active position, so it brings me reassurance in view of all that I record here to refer the historians to the state-archives for the purpose of further completion, without seeing me exposed to the danger of falsification by the files.

***

My adopted motto — “Strength in Right” [“Kraft im Recht” — could be translated as “Strength in Law”, “Force within Justice”, and other variations.] — is the expression of my conviction and it marks the foundation of my way of thought and conduct.

I have never attached another value to words than that of the expression of correct concepts, to theories never the value of deeds, and I have always regarded preconceived systems as the product of leisured heads or the outburst of emotional minds.

Not in the struggle of society towards progress, but rather in progression towards the true goods: towards freedom as the inevitable yield of order; towards equality in its only applicable degree of that before the law; towards prosperity, inconceivable without the foundation of moral and material peace; towards credit, which can rest only on the basis of trust — in all that I have recognised the duty of government and the true salvation for the governed.

I have looked upon despotism of every kind as a symptom of weakness. Where it appears, it is a self-punitive evil, most intolerable when it poses behind the mask of promoting the cause of freedom.

Monarchy and republic are to me amenable concepts. Monarchies placed on republican foundations, and republics on monarchical, are arrangements standing in self-contradiction, which I do not understand. Both monarchies and republics can thrive only on those foundations suitable to each. And the best constitution for every state will always be that which best matches the peculiarities that every political body bears within itself. That the monarchical form has to its credit the longer duration in great succession, rests on historical knowledge. As minister of an empire structured as a monarchy, I had only to deal with matters of dispute that concern a monarchy. Accordingly it goes without saying that I excluded matters that concern a republic.

A state without a constitution I hold for an abstraction, akin to the presumption of an individual without a constitution of his own. I am of the same opinion as regards the application of a uniform constitutional system to all states.

The concept of the balancing of powers [“Balancing of powers” — i.e., the separation of legislature, executive, and judiciary, and the balancing of each against the others.] (proposed by Montesquieu) has always appeared to me only as a conceptual error of the English constitution, impractical in its application, because the concept of such a balancing is rooted in the assumption of an eternal struggle, instead of in that of peace, the first necessity for the life and prosperity of states.

The care for the inner life of states has always had for me the worth of the most important task for governments.

As the foundations for politics I recognise the concepts of right and equity and not the sole calculations of use, whilst I look upon capricious politics as an ever self-punitive confusion of the spirit.

***

I entered political life equipped of necessity with a spirit which is able to represent only the positive.

My temperament is an historical one, reluctant of any kind of romance.

My conduct is a prosaic and not a poetical one. I am a man of right, and reject in all things appearance where it divides as such from truth, thereupon deprived as the foundation of right, where it must inevitably dissolve into error.

Born and brought up under social conditions which the outbreak of the social revolution in France prepared in the year 1789, these conditions are well-known to me. The elements of strength as of weakness, out of which the earlier and later situations developed, have never eluded me. A strict and at the same time calm observer of events, I have always interpreted and pursued them in their points of origin and in their natural as well as their manufactured development.

I spent my fifty-four years of service first as a socially elevated witness to the French Revolution and later as an actor amongst its monstrous spawn.

In direct or in indirect contact and in commerce with all regents, first statesmen, and the most important party-leaders, in the course of this period spanning almost three generations nothing of essential influence on the development of events remained unknown to me.

Accordingly I did not lack in the knowledge of experience.

Two elements in human society stand and will always stand in conflict with one another: the positive and the negative, the conservative and the destructive. I have always regarded as the most important task of the statesman the concern to fix in sight, and to distinguish between, the things which emerge of themselves and the things which in the course of time are interposed by the party spirit.

The most ample means of answering this task lies in the concern to interpret and assess words according to the value of the things which they are appointed to denote. This concern I have always made a duty.

As key to my mindset, I shall cite a few examples.

For me the word “freedom” has not the value of a starting-point, but rather that of an actual point of arrival. The word “order” denotes the starting-point. Only on the concept of order can that of freedom rest. Without the foundation of order, the call for freedom is nothing more than the striving of some party after an envisaged end. In its actual use, the call inevitably expresses itself as tyranny. Whilst I have at all times and in all situations ever been a man of order, my striving was addressed to true and not deceptive freedom. In my eyes, tyranny of any kind has only the value of absolute nonsense. As a means to an end, I mark it as the most vapid that time and circumstance is able to place at the disposal of rulers.

The concept of order in view of legislation — the foundation of order — is, in consequence of the conditions under which states live, capable of the most varied application. Considered as constitution, it will prove itself best for any state that answers to the demands of both the material conditions and those moral conditions peculiar to the national character. There is no universal recipe for constitutions, just as little as there is some universal means for the boosting of health.

The arrangement which has the true value of a constitution is formed in states and can arise only of itself. Charters are no constitutions; their worth does not extend to that of foundations for an emergent and regular order in the workings of the state.

It is an indubitable truth that constitutions exercise a considerable influence on the formation of popular feeling. The counterpart of this truth, however, is that, in order to endure, a constitution must be the product of this popular feeling, and not that of an agitated and hence transitory spirit.

A consideration, which the liberal spirit usually disregards and yet which in its consequences belongs to the most important, is that of the difference which in states, as in the life of individuals, ensues between the advance of things by measured steps and by leaps. In the former, conditions develop to a logically and naturally lawful consequence, whilst the latter tears consistency apart. Everything in nature follows the way of development, of the ordered succession of things; by such a course alone is the discarding of the bad and the fostering of the good conceivable. Change by leaps brings about ever new creations — and man is able to create nothingness.

To step beyond the domain in which principles have their standing, and to trespass on the field of bold theories, I have always regarded as a mistake whose consequences elude reckoning. To give room to the hope that government as well as parties could remain on the incline where they are placed, masters of stopping at the right moment, I have regarded as an ever-active delusion, and I have never granted to the natural powers more rights or less influence than which are due to them.

Considering all matters entirely, and not by half, knowing no difference between giving and keeping my word, it was only the consequence of my moral formation as a whole that I neither would nor could have been either the promoter of upheavals, which hide themselves behind the mask of progress, or of reforms, which are realisable only by upheaval. The Revolution, in all the means at its disposal, has testified to this.

I was never a symptom-doctor. I knew to observe symptoms as signs of a cause, but my gaze was always turned to the cause itself, be it good or evil, curative or ominous. That in all matters there is one that has the value of a cause, and to that one is to be given help or hindrance, this I have always looked upon as the true task of the statesman. Long before taking office, I had already regarded Napoleon as the object which I had to hold in view as the most important formation of the time. In him the Revolution had been incarnated; his power had stultified it in the social direction, but in the political it was a double-edged weapon which he knew how to use with a strong arm and an even stronger spirit.

I did not govern the empire. Therein the powers at every level were not just strictly administered and directed to their competences, but rather in this regard were even relinquished to trepidation, which brought hesitancy to the course of affairs. The principle of government of the Emperor Francis was set forth in the motto “Justitia regnorum fundamentum” [“Justice is the Foundation of Kingdoms.”], not only as it lay in his spirit and character, but also as it served him as strict guide in all governmental affairs. He agreed with my observation that the axiom, correct in its point of origin, could be abrogated in the excessive practice of particular cases, but he usually added: “I was born and through my status appointed for the execution of justice; the inevitable hardness in particular cases is better than the slackening of rule through too many exceptions.” My motto is “Strength in Right”. Both sayings run together in meaning, except that the imperial motto has an abstractly judicial significance, whereas mine has a significance more grounded in state law. In this regard, the motto “Recta tueri” [“To uphold the law” or “To defend rights”.], suggested by me to Emperor Ferdinand upon his most supreme accession, bids a further nuance.

***

Affairs are the expression of the men who have influence on them. Concepts, be they slight or grave, refer not just to the nature of affairs; the peculiarities and features thereof, which are called into action in negotiations, must also be taken into fundamental consideration. In no course of affairs do these truths express themselves more forcefully than in the field of government.

The two worst arrangements affecting public administration are preconceived systems and personal considerations. The first contend with praxis; the latter put petty and transitory considerations in the place of substantive ones.

One of the greatest impediments in the long course of my ministry was the lack of energy which burdened the internal administration, a matter of fact which I cannot leave untouched, because it is indispensable to the elucidation of the course of world-historical events and was bound to exercise a prolonged influence on my work in the diplomatic field which fell under my remit.

In the internal arrangement of the empire, the nationalities gained a position which was bound to be expressed by the selection, and in the activity, of public officials from the lowest rank to the highest. In a state thus arranged, it is for natural reasons difficult to find men who might set a dam against the preponderance of nationality and comply with strict impartiality in all directions against the heightened demands emerging out of it.

That I stood alone on the moral-political field: that I knew, that I had to know, since, daily and in all directions, there was at my command the monitoring of the facts. Should I have changed accordingly my way of thought and conduct? I did not want it so, and had I wanted it, I would not have been able. Against the sayings of my conscience and against the concepts fixed in me of what is right or wrong, shrewd or without hope of success — to act against them I never conceived, and my own deeds I always scrutinised more strictly than the deeds of others!

The work of any statesman, who was long in office, affords material for varied interpretations of what went through his mind, be it in a straight or skewed direction, of what he wanted and did not want, and of what he achieved or did not achieve. Subject to this fate are all those who have played an outstanding part in the affairs of state, but so much more must such a fate weigh on a name which, in an epoch of unprecedented agitation, presided over the politics of a great empire for almost forty years.

In what times did my official life fall? Let sight be drawn to the circumstances in which our empire and the whole of Europe stood between the years 1809 and 1848, and then let it be asked, whether a man was able by the success of his insight to transfigure the crises into a recovery! I admit to having recognised the situation, but also to the impossibility of instituting a new structure in our empire and in Germany, which is why my concern was addressed above all to the preservation of the existing one.

In the Spring of 1848 the state-structures of central Europe were toppled in some places, and destabilised in others, as if by a violent earthquake. The impetus came once again — as always since the end of the eighteenth century — from France. Its effect was expressed according to physical laws; the tremor affected the stand-alone structures differently from the small ones wedged in between them. The former felt it more violently. France, whose superstructure was made out of lighter material, became covered in dust. In the great Middle Empire [Refers to an area stretching from Friesland to Provence, and from Aachen to Rome, once ruled by Lothair I (795-855AD), grandson of Charlemagne.], masonry and beams overwhelmed the ground, burying the old order of things. The same fate was bound to befall me. Yet granted to me belongs one of the rare fates of men: I experienced and survived the turning-point in the world-struggle.

***

I made history and therefore did not find time to write it.

I did not at any rate adjudge myself able to answer this double task. And my years have been too far advanced to devote myself to it after my retirement. Remote from the necessary archival sources, I would have to consult my memory alone.

I have not subjected myself to this endeavour, but rather seek a surrogate here in denoted form.

The history of my almost thirty-nine-year ministry lies chronicled in three repositories:

1. In the archive of the department, over which I presided, the files of which encompass the period from the Battle of Wagram in the Summer of 1809 up until 13th March 1848.

2. In a file-collection which I bequeath under the title: “Materials for the History of my Time”.

3. In correspondences and articles which I have maintained and composed during my retirement.

Combined, these sources offer comprehensive material for impartial historians.

Neither self-love nor the propensity to dogmatism underlie my urge to make known the views and feelings which I had in mind throughout my time in office. My sentiment rests on another foundation; in it prevails the historical element and the concern for truth.

I attach to the preceding words the value of a testamentary disposition.