But workday experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living, it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ.

So, the development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a place to rest.

With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free people.

But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar principle of popular self-direction.

It has always come to something in the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic principle of personal authority.