Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

nothing that more than almost any other people he was prone to lose his nationality and
fatherland. The lovely proverb, 'with hat in hand, he travels all about the land,' tells the
whole story.
This compliance became really disastrous, however, when it determined the sole form in
which the monarch could be approached; that is, never to contradict him, but agree to
anything and everything that His Majesty condescends to do. Precisely in this place was free,
manly dignity most necessary; otherwise the monarchic institution was one day bound to
perish from all this crawling; for crawling it was and nothing else! And only miserable
crawlers and sneaks-in short, all the decadents who have always felt more at ease around
the highest thrones than sincere, decent, honorable souls-can regard this as the sole proper
form of intercourse with the bearers of the crown! These 'most humble' creatures, to be sure,
despite all their humility before their master and source of livelihood, have always
demonstrated the greatest arrogance toward the rest of humanity, and worst of all when they
pass themselves off with shameful effrontery on their sinful fellow men as the only
'monarchists'; this is real gall such as only these ennobled or even unennobled tapeworms
are capable of! For in reality these people remained the gravediggers of the monarchy and
particularly the monarchistic idea. Nothing else is conceivable: a man who is prepared to
stand up for a cause will never and can never be a sneak and a spineless lickspittle. Anyone
who is really serious about the preservation and furtherance of an institution will cling to it
with the last fiber of his heart and will not be able to abandon it if evils of some sort appear
in this institution. To be sure, he will not cry this out to the whole public as the democratic
'friends' of the monarchy did in the exact same lying way; he will most earnestly warn and
attempt to influence His Majesty, the bearer of the crown himself. He will not and must not
adopt the attitude that His Majesty remains free to act according to his own will anyway,
even if this obviously must and will lead to a catastrophe, but in such a case he will have to
protect the monarchy against the monarch, and this despite all perils. If the value of this
institution lay in the momentary person of the monarch, it would be the worst institution
that can be imagined; for monarchs only in the rarest cases are the cream of wisdom and
reason or even of character, as some people like to claim. This is believed only by
professional lickspittles and sneaks, but all straightforward men-and these remain the most
valuable men in the state despite everything- will only feel repelled by the idea of arguing
such nonsense. For them history remains history and the truth the truth even where
monarchs are concerned. No, the good fortune to possess a great monarch who is also a
great man falls to peoples so seldom that they must be content if the malice of Fate abstains
at least from the worst possible mistakes.
Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of
the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of a heroic genius
like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I. This happens once in centuries
and hardly more often. Otherwise the idea takes precedence over the person and the
meaning of this institution must lie exclusively in the institution itself. With this the
monarch himself falls into the sphere of service. Then he, too, becomes a mere cog in this
work, to which he is obligated as such. Then he, too, must comply with a higher purpose,
and the ' monarchist' is then no longer the man who in silence lets the bearer of the crown
profane it, but the man who prevents this. Otherwise, it would not be permissible to depose
an obviously insane prince, if the sense of the institution lay not in the idea, but in the '
sanctified ' person at any price.
Today it is really necessary to put this down, for in recent times more and more of these
creatures, to whose wretched attitude the collapse of the monarchy must not least of all be
attributed are rising out of obscurity. With a certain naive gall, these people have started in
again to speak of nothing but 'their King'- whom only a few years ago they left in the lurch in
the critical hour and in the most despicable fashion-and are beginning to represent every
person who is not willing to agree to their lying tirades as a bad German. And in reality they