Kotzebue.—­My celebrity and distinctions, if I must speak of them, quite satisfy me.  Neither in youth nor in advancing age—­neither in difficult nor in easy circumstances, have I ventured to proclaim myself the tutor or the guardian of mankind.

Sandt.—­I understand the reproof, and receive it humbly and gratefully.  You did well in writing the dramas, and the novels, and the travels; but, pardon my question, who called you to the courts of princes in strange countries?

Kotzebue.—­They themselves.

Sandt.—­They have no more right to take you away from your country, than to eradicate a forest, or to subvert a church in it.  You belong to the land that bore you, and were not at liberty—­(if right and liberty are one, and unless they are, they are good for nothing)—­you were not at liberty, I repeat it, to enter into the service of an alien.

Kotzebue.—­No magistrate, higher or lower, forbade me.  Fine notions of freedom are these!

Sandt.—­A man is always a minor in regard to his fatherland; and the servants of his fatherland are wrong and criminal, if they whisper in his ear that he may go away, that he may work in another country, that he may ask to be fed in it, and that he may wait there until orders and tasks are given for his hands to execute.  Being a German, you voluntarily placed yourself in a position where you might eventually be coerced to act against Germans.

Kotzebue.—­I would not.

Sandt.—­Perhaps you think so.

Kotzebue.—­Sir, I know my duty.

Sandt.—­We all do; yet duties are transgressed, and daily.  Where the will is weak in accepting, it is weaker in resisting.  Already have you left the ranks of your fellow-citizens—­already have you taken the enlisting money and marched away.

Kotzebue.—­Phrases! metaphors! and let me tell you, M. Sandt, not very polite ones.  You have hitherto seen little of the world, and you speak rather the language of books than of men.

Sandt.—­What! are books written by some creatures of less intellect than ours?  I fancied them to convey the language and reasonings of men.  I was wrong, and you are right, Von Kotzebue!  They are, in general, the productions of such as have neither the constancy of courage, nor the continuity of sense, to act up to what they know to be right, or to maintain it, even in words, to the end of their lives.  You are aware that I am speaking now of political ethics.  This is the worst I can think of the matter, and bad enough is this.

Kotzebue.—­You misunderstand me.  Our conduct must fall in with our circumstances.  We may be patriotic, yet not puritanical in our patriotism, not harsh, nor intolerant, nor contracted.  The philosophical mind should consider the whole world as its habitation, and not look so minutely into it as to see the lines that divide nations and governments; much less should it act the part of a busy shrew, and take pleasure in giving loose to the tongue, at finding things a little out of place.