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Keller on the Wonder and Limitations of Democracy |
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Contributed by Administrator
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With the thoughtlessness of youth and of a second childhood, I had deemed the beauty of the countryside to be the product of an historical-political process, in a certain measure the patriotic deed of the people to be equated with freedom itself, and so hale I strode through the Catholic and Protestant regions, through those which had been awakened and which were stubborn in their obfuscation, and what appeared to me to be a great sieve filled with constitutions, confessions, parties, sovereignties and citizenries, through which at length a certain and clear consensus was to be squeezed, which was at once a consensus of power, of temper, of spirit, which was prepared to live on, and then I was struck by a great desire to raise myself up as an individual and as representative piece of the totality and to do battle? to aid in the hunt of the noble quarry of the majority, of which I was a part, but which to him is therefore no dearer than the minority which he has vanquished, precisely because they were in the end of the same nature. . . .
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