years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may
yet have to run their course before our fellow-countrymen become
permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have
it said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians."

II.

If, however, our public and private life is so manifestly devoid of
all signs of a productive and characteristic culture; if, moreover,
our great artists, with that earnest vehemence and honesty which is
peculiar to greatness admit, and have admitted, this monstrous
fact--so very humiliating to a gifted nation; how can it still be
possible for contentment to reign to such an astonishing extent among
German scholars? And since the last war this complacent spirit has
seemed ever more and morerready to break forth into exultant cries and
demonstrations of triumph. At all events, the belief seems to be rife
that we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormous
incongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of the
inferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed by
the few and the select. For all those who think with the public mind
have blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. The incongruity is
not even acknowledged to exist. How is this possible? What power is
sufficiently influential to deny this existence? What species of men
must have attained to supremacy in Germany that feelings which are so
strong and simple should he denied or prevented from obtaining
expression? This power, this species of men, I will name--they are the
Philistines of Culture.

As every one knows, the word "Philistine" is borrowed from the
vernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense,