Everywhere and at all times there has been much discontent with governments, laws and public regulations; for the most part, however, because men are always ready to make institutions responsible for the misery inseparable from human existence itself; which is, to speak mythically, the curse that was laid on Adam, and through him on the whole race.  But never has that delusion been proclaimed in a more mendacious and impudent manner than by the demagogues of the Jetstzeit—­of the day we live in.  As enemies of Christianity, they are, of course, optimists:  to them the world is its own end and object, and accordingly in itself, that is to say, in its own natural constitution, it is arranged on the most excellent principles, and forms a regular habitation of bliss.  The enormous and glaring evils of the world they attribute wholly to governments:  if governments, they think, were to do their duty, there would be a heaven upon earth; in other words, all men could eat, drink, propagate and die, free from trouble and want.  This is what they mean when they talk of the world being “its own end and object”; this is the goal of that “perpetual progress of the human race,” and the other fine things which they are never tired of proclaiming.

Formerly it was faith which was the chief support of the throne; nowadays it is credit.  The Pope himself is scarcely more concerned to retain the confidence of the faithful than to make his creditors believe in his own good faith.  If in times past it was the guilty debt of the world which was lamented, now it is the financial debts of the world which arouse dismay.  Formerly it was the Last Day which was prophesied; now it is the [Greek:  seisachtheia] the great repudiation, the universal bankruptcy of the nations, which will one day happen; although the prophet, in this as in the other case, entertains a firm hope that he will not live to see it himself.

From an ethical and a rational point of view, the right of possession rests upon an incomparably better foundation than the right of birth; nevertheless, the right of possession is allied with the right of birth and has come to be part and parcel of it, so that it would hardly be possible to abolish the right of birth without endangering the right of possession.  The reason of this is that most of what a man possesses he inherited, and therefore holds by a kind of right of birth; just as the old nobility bear the names only of their hereditary estates, and by the use of those names do no more than give expression to the fact that they own the estates.  Accordingly all owners of property, if instead of being envious they were wise, ought also to support the maintenance of the rights of birth.