These addresses adjure you, princes of Germany!  Those who act toward you as though no man dared say aught to you, or had aught to say, are despicable flatterers, are base slanderers of you yourselves.  Drive them far from you!  The truth is that you were born exactly as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that, exactly like ourselves, you must hear and learn if you are to escape from this natural ignorance.  Your share in bringing about the fate which has befallen you simultaneously with your peoples is here set forth in the mildest way and, as we believe, in the way which is alone right and just; and in case you wish to hear only flattery, and never the truth, you cannot complain regarding these addresses.  Let all this be forgotten, even as all the rest of us also desire that our share in the guilt may be forgotten.  Now begins a new life as well for yourselves as for all of us.  May this voice penetrate to you through all the surroundings which normally make you inaccessible!  With proud self-reliance it dares to say to you:  You rule nations, faithful, plastic, and worthy of good fortune, such as princes of no time and of no nation have ruled.  They have a feeling for freedom and are capable of it; but, because you so willed, they have followed you into sanguinary war against that which to them seemed freedom.  Some among you have later willed otherwise, and, again because you so willed, they have followed you into that which to them must seem a war of annihilation against one of the last remnants of German independence.  Since that time they have endured and have borne the oppressive burden of common woes; yet they do not cease to be faithful to you, to cling to you with inward devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians.  Yet may you notice them, unobserved by them; set free from surroundings which do not invariably present to you the fairest aspect of humanity, may you be able to descend into the house of the citizen, into the peasant’s cottage, and may you be able attentively to follow the still and hidden life of these classes, in which the fidelity and the probity which have become more rare in the higher classes seem to have sought refuge!  Surely, oh, surely, you will resolve to reflect more seriously than ever how they may be helped!  These addresses have proposed to you a means of assistance which they believe to be sure, thorough, and decisive.  Let your councillors deliberate whether they also find it so or whether they know a better means, provided only that it be equally decisive.  But the conviction that something must be done and must be done immediately, that this something must be radical and final, and that the time for half-measures and procrastination is past—­this conviction these addresses would fain produce, if they could, in you personally, as they still cherish the utmost confidence in your integrity.

These addresses adjure you, Germans as a whole, whatever position you may take in society, that each one among you who can think, think first of all upon the theme that has been suggested, and that each one do for it exactly what in his own place lies nearest to him.