in the event, it only too truly proved; but to become thorough Germans,
so I thought, would seem to them something in earnest, something worth
the striving for, especially after such hard and special trials as had
recently been endured by the German nation.

With your penetrating judgment you quarrelled with that term "German
education;" but, after all, even the appeal to be made thorough Germans
proved to be too grandiose and liable to be misunderstood. For every one
said "German? Well, I _am_ German, and have been so from my birth, just
as a mushroom is a mushroom;[103] what, then, do I want with education
to teach me to be a thorough German?" What would these worthy people
have said, had I asked them to train themselves to become thorough men?
Now had I planned my educational institute altogether differently, had I
offered to train a special class, body-servants, footmen or housemaids,
shoemakers or tailors, tradesmen or merchants, soldiers or even
noblemen, then should I have gained fame and glory for the great
usefulness and practical nature of my institution, for certain; and
surely all men would have hastened to acknowledge it as an important
matter, and as a thing to be adequately supported by the State. I should
have been held as the right man in the right place by the State and by
the world; and so much the more because as a State-machine I should have
been engaged in cutting out and modelling other State-machines. But I--I
only wanted to train up free, thinking, independent men! Now who wants
to be, or who cares to suffer another to be, a free-thinking,
independent man? If it was folly to talk about educating persons as
Germans, what was it to talk about educating them as men? The education
of Germans was felt to be something extraordinary and farfetched; the
education of men was a mere shadow, a deceitful image, a blind
enthusiasm.[104]