Le Bon says that the Frenchman, too, thinks of the state as something to be kept at a minimum and to a certain extent to be opposed. Opposition to the government is a part of the Frenchman's plan of life. Boutroux says the same--that in France the habit of thinking of the government and of society as two rivals has not been overcome.
Our own idea of government is certainly somewhat different from these. We are watchful of individual right, but we do not tend to think of government either as opponent or as servant. We do not ask the government to take care of us as individuals, and we do not feel in the public attitude the resistance to government that the French writers observe in France. The American expects on the whole to look out for his own interests and he has never felt the pressure and over-powering force of government--until perhaps now. Mabie says that the American has conceived of his government as existing to keep the house in order while the family lived its life freely, every individual following the bent of his own genius.
These temperamental attitudes toward government, we said, seem quite apart from scientific and philosophic conceptions of state. We see, however, something of the temperament reflected in the philosophies. Philosophers do not wholly detach themselves from the mores of their race. The monarchy of Germany, Munsterberg says, appeals to the _moral personality and the æsthetic imagination_. Its main function, however, is to safeguard the German people. Its faults are the faults of its virtues. Other German writers praise the German government especially for its efficiency, for its incomparable body of officials--indeed for its very clock-work perfection that Bergson hates in Prussian life. Lehmann goes so far as to say that the German state had reached the _perfect balance_ between individualism and communism. These writers see plenty of self-realization in German society, and quite enough of participation, on the part of the individual, in the government. Schmoller (51) denies that Germany ever lacked the spirit of free institutions, and even compares Germany with ancient Attica, which he thinks was great not because of the rule of the _demos_, but because the people followed their aristocratic leaders. Troeltsch tries to show that the German idea of freedom is different from, and indeed superior to, that of all other peoples. The French, he says, rest their idea of freedom upon the doctrine of the equality of all citizens, but in reality lawyers and plutocrats prevail. The English idea of freedom comes from Puritanic ideas; the individual's independence of the state is based upon the idea of natural rights, and upon the theory of the creation of the state by the individual. But German freedom is something entirely different. Here freedom is in education, and in the spiritual content of individuality. German freedom is the freedom that comes from the spontaneous recognition of rights and duties. Parliaments are good in their place, but after all they are not the essence of freedom.