Your forefathers unite with these addresses and adjure you.  Imagine that in my voice are mingled the voices of your ancestors from dim antiquity, who with their bodies opposed the on-rushing dominion of the world-power of Rome, who with their blood won the independence of the mountains, plains, and streams which, under your governance, have become the booty of the stranger.  They call to you:  Represent us; transmit to posterity our memory honorable and blameless as it came to you, and as you have boasted of it and of descent from us.  Thus far our resistance has been held to be noble and great and wise; we seemed to be initiated into the secrets of the divine plan of the universe.  If our race terminates with you, our honor is turned to shame and our wisdom to folly.  For if the German stock was some time to be merged into that of Rome, it was better that this had been into the old Rome than into a new.  We faced the former and conquered it; before the latter you have been scattered like the dust.  Now, however, since affairs are as they are, you are not to conquer them with physical weapons; only your spirit is to rise and stand upright over against them.  To you has been vouchsafed the greater destiny of establishing generally the empire of the spirit and of reason, and of wholly annihilating rude physical power as that which dominates the world.  If you shall do this, then are you worthy of descent from us.

In these voices also mingle the spirits of your later ancestors, of those who fell in the holy struggle for freedom of religion and of faith.  Save our honor, likewise, they cry to you.  It was not wholly clear to us for what we fought.  Besides the legitimate resolve not to allow ourselves to be dominated in matters of conscience by a foreign power, we were also impelled by a higher spirit who never revealed himself entirely unto us.  To you this spirit is revealed, if you have the power to look into the spirit world, and he gazes upon you with clear and lofty eyes.  The motley and confused intermingling of sensuous and of spiritual impulses is wholly to be deposed from its world-dominion; and spirit alone, absolute, and stripped of all sensuous impulses, is to take the helm of human affairs.  Our blood was shed that this spirit might have freedom to develop and to grow to an independent existence.  Upon you it depends to give to this sacrifice its signification and its justification by installing this spirit into the world-dominion destined for him.  If this is not the final goal toward which all the development of our nation has thus far aimed, our struggles, too, become a passing, empty farce, and the freedom of spirit and of conscience that we won is an empty word, if henceforth there is to be no longer any spirit or any conscience whatsoever.