Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Along with all the evils of German life before the War here indicated, and many more, there
were also many advantages. In a fair examination, we must even recognize that most of our
weaknesses were largely shared by other countries and peoples, and in some, indeed, we
were put completely in the shade, while they did not possess many of our own actual
advantages.
At the head of these advantages we can, among other things, set the fact that, of nearly all
European peoples, the German people still made the greatest attempt to preserve the
national character of its economy and despite certain evil omens was least subject to
international financial control. A dangerous advantage, to be sure, which later became the
greatest instigator of the World War. But aside from this and many other things, we must,
from the vast number of healthy sources of national strength, pick three institutions which
in their kind were exemplary and in part unequaled.
First, the state form as such and the special stamp which it had received in modern
Germany.
Here we may really disregard the individual monarchs who as men are subject to all the
weaknesses which are customarily visited upon this earth and its children; if we were not
lenient in this, we would have to despair of the present altogether, for are not the
representatives of the present regime, considered as personalities, intellectually and morally
of the most modest proportions that we can conceive of even racking our brains for a long
time? Anyone who measures the 'value' of the German revolution by the value and stature of
the personalities which it has given the German people since November, 1919, will have to
hide his head for shame before the judgment of future generations, whose tongue it will no
longer be possible to stop by protective laws, etc., and which therefore will say what today all
of us know to be true, to wit, that brains and virtue in our modern German leaders are
inversely proportionate to their vices and the size of their mouths.
To be sure, the monarchy had grown alien to many, to the broad masses above all. This was
the consequence of the fact that the monarchs were not always surrounded by the brightest -
to put it mildly-and above all not by the sincerest minds. Unfortunately, a number of them
liked fiatterers better than straightforward natures, and consequently it was the fiatterers
who 'instructed' them. A very grave evil at a time when many of the world's old opinions had
undergone a great change, spreading naturally to the estimation in which many oldestablished
traditions of the courts were held.
Thus, at the turn of the century the common man in the street could no longer find any
special admiration for the princess who rode along the front in uniform. Apparently those in
authority were incapable of correctly judging the effect of such a parade in the eyes of the
people, for if they had, such unfortunate performances would doubtless not have occurred.
Moreover, the humanitarian bilge-not always entirely sincere-that these circles went in for
repelled more than it attracted. If, for example, Princess X condescended to taste a sample of
food in a people's kitchen, in former days it might have looked well, but now the result was
the opposite. We may be justified in assuming that Her Highness really had no idea that the
food on the day she sampled it was a little different from what it usually was; but it was quite
enough that the people knew it.
Thus, what may possibly have been the best intention became ridiculous, if not actually
irritating.
Stories about the monarch's proverbial frugality, his much too early rising and his slaving
away until late into the night, amid the permanent peril of threatening undernourishment,
aroused very dubious comments. People did not ask to know what food and how much of it
the monarch deigned to consume; they did not begrudge him a 'square' meal; nor were they