Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Telephone No. 3805. Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Unfranked letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. Rates for advertisements: the four-column petit line, 10 kr. Single numbers 15 kr.

Subscription prices: Austria-Hungary: half-yearly 3 fl. = 6 Kr., yearly 6 fl. = 12 Kr.; for abroad: Germany yearly 13 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 85 Pf.; England yearly 14 shg., half-yearly 7 shg.; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 frcs., half-yearly 8 frcs. 50 cts.; America yearly 3 doll. 40.

No. 47. | Vienna, 25 November 1898. | Second Year.

As a considerable number of subscriptions expire at the end of this month, those concerned are reminded to renew them in good time, so that no interruption may occur in the delivery of the paper.

The Administration.

Popular and National!

By S. Lublinski.

A simple man who has lived through and experienced much possesses a treasure of worldly wisdom, which he dispenses in the coin of apt and telling proverbs, or of parables and anecdotes. He has seen many a false wealth in his day, varnish and tinsel gold, which caught people's eyes and dazzled and corrupted them. But he knows that such an unsound condition can have no permanence and that sooner or later it must collapse beyond rescue. If then one of the young men comes to him, the man of much experience, and speaks in admiring tones of the neighbour's wealth, he dismisses him with the short, pithy words: “All is not gold that glitters.” Or it has often befallen him that lies and deceit and crime, a wrong of many years' standing, strode triumphant through the world and at last drew over to itself all the half-hearted and the weak. But here too time brought atonement and requital, in that the general poisoning of the blood at length broke out at one spot and brought about either the recovery or the destruction of the tainted organism. This social-psychological process, which the old man has often witnessed and which arms him with patience, he sums up in the words: “God's mills grind slowly, but surely.” Or again: “Nothing is spun so fine but it must come to the light of the sun.” He can tell too of a pitcher that goes to the water until at last it breaks; and this image, like all the others, is drawn from the experience of daily life. Perhaps he saw a bit of pebble lying in the road which glittered and sparkled in the sun like pure gold, so that a child at play stretched out its hands for it, only to grasp in the end nothing but a shabby pebble. And the other proverbs refer to the grinding of a mill, to spinning, to an everyday occurrence at the village well. The simple man of the people feels, as every man does, the need to carry into his life some reflection of eternity and sanctity, to create symbols for himself. Before his house grows a mighty tree; it still puts forth new boughs and leaves, and has already given shade to his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, perhaps to yet earlier ancestors, or at the least to earlier inhabitants of this house and village. This historical fact becomes at once a symbol of the eternal, an intimation of the connection of the generations and of an original and ineradicable unity of all mankind. To be sure, the simple villager before whose house the giant tree stands will not render account of his feeling in such lofty words and thoughts; he says to himself quite simply: “This tree means good fortune for you and for your sons and grandsons. But if you cut it down, that is a sin, and you must come to a miserable end.” Such a belief arises still more readily when religion comes into play. Then a god or a goddess dwells in the tree, or a crucifix is hung within it. The like may be asserted of particular buildings and localities, of stone altars, sacred groves and such things. That these places became sanctuaries they owe first of all to the circumstance that they were once thoroughly popular, that they bore some relation or other to everyday life. The man of the people draws not only his worldly wisdom, but also his morality and his metaphysics, from the nearest experience, from things and relations that he can behold with his eyes, handle and grasp. And for that reason he is also incapable of separating his ethics from the outward symbols, and ends by confounding the two. Woe to him who fells his tree, who enters the sacred grove unbidden, or crumbles away so much as a little stone from the altar. In olden times such a reprobate and accursed one was beaten to death, burned, torn asunder; and later, when that would no longer do, he was at the least placed under civil and social ban and outlawry. No one will deny the high poetry and the healthy fountain-force that streams out on every side from popular wisdom and popular morality; but neither will anyone deny the grave dangers of a moral and intellectual kind which often enough appear as the devastating effect of a popular narrowness. The people, for good and for ill, cannot get out of its own skin even when it comes into contact with larger, historical and national circles. In the last century a simple Prussian understood but little of the economic and political significance of his great King, and therefore strove eagerly, this mighty man