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No. 5. — Vienna, 4 February 1898. — Year II.

M. von Egidy.

By A. Gundaccar von Suttner.

It would be a thing of impossibility to render, in a brief essay, that which Egidy strives to attain and which he also believes he will attain. The man is too many-sided for one to set him forth in a few strokes as he is, and so a sketch of him can be but something incomplete, a makeshift with which one may fix upon this or that characteristic trait, yet without laying into it the soul that can speak to us only out of a complete picture, executed by an understanding artist's hand. And even then, I believe, the dead letter would not suffice to render Egidy true to life. To see him, to hear him — that is indispensable if one is to grasp him in his whole great significance. Some things, to be sure, press themselves upon us at once when we read him, and above all this: that we have to do with a man who speaks to us out of honest, soundly honest conviction, who tells us that which moves him because he must say it, and who is animated by an unshakable faith in the capacity of mankind to develop toward the good. And toward that he labours with the whole force of his great talent — toward man's willing to become good. Education, with him too, begins indeed with the school, but it does not end there: it accompanies man along his whole path through life, even when the mentor no longer walks beside the individual, but when the individual must be his own mentor, the eternal admonisher who never wearies of saying to himself: "I will be good!" Out of this striving after goodness alone the whole in truth develops: it may stand as the foundation upon which the further building-up of Egidy's thoughts rests. Goodness — the first condition: honest, naturally felt goodness. The second condition: faith, the firm, unshakable faith that it must become so, namely among all men: that the willing, the readiness thereto, becomes their second nature; that they can no longer do otherwise than will it. One must not here misunderstand Egidy and suppose that he would at a single stroke make angels of men, who know no other striving than to shower their neighbours with goodness and to deny themselves utterly. No, such an idealist or Utopian he is not; for itself too the individual shall be good, shall claim for itself the same that it would give its neighbour, and thus, beside altruism, acknowledge a legitimate egoism, one that leads so far toward self-consciousness that each single person may regard himself as the central point upon our little earth. At the first moment it may seem paradoxical, and yet a purified egoism, kept within ethical bounds, can proceed very well alongside altruism — the one completing the other, and both may interlock. Only the consciousness of the legitimate, the equally legitimate "I" will soften the antitheses in all social domains, which still confront one another so harshly, and at length bring them to adjustment. The next consequence must be the fullest tolerance (in each and every thing) toward one's neighbour, for the recognition of the "I-entitlement" of every man necessarily brings with it the recognition of personal individuality in every direction. Then at a single stroke fall the barriers which hitherto divided mankind: then tolerance extends, naturally and quite of itself, to all without exception — to the diversity, or let us say the individuality, of races, of confessions, of estates, of classes — in short, to everything. Quite rightly does Egidy say that to-day already every single man is a man of another faith, that each has his individuality of belief. And that too is the inviolable right of every single person, at which no other has any claim to shake. Therefore Egidy demands a de-confessionalisation in the widest sense of the word, for confession is not religion, and is therefore strictly to be sundered from it, so that the abuse of regarding both concepts as identical may be swept from the world. Every inner elevation of man is religion: he can thus be religious without letting himself be ranged in any creed whatever. And in what form he will be religious is solely and alone his own affair. But the confession of goodness and of love will be the religion of the future, the bond which unites all men into a single humanity. That is Egidy's rock-firm faith, to which he clings with all assurance. Mankind must develop toward this faith, for the sacred law of development stands foremost, as fundamental law, in the book of Nature. Therefore it is above all a matter of taking up the struggle against those for whom Egidy has invented the apt designation "the Utopians of standstill": those short-sighted ones, still so numerously represented to-day, who only ever see what once was and what after them will therefore also be, but not that which must be.

Struggle! It is really a word which Egidy does not gladly employ, for his weapon is the mildness and goodness with which he sets upon the fiercest foe