National Socialism, according to Rauschning, is neither a doctrine nor philosophy. It is a movement having no fixed aims, either economic or political, and the great paradox of the revolution Is that its lack of principles is its strength and one of the main secrets of its effectiveness.
The National Socialist movement 1s retrogression from the sphere of legality: and constitutionalism to the primeval conception of Leader and Followers and the principle of absolute power and blind obedience, 'There has developed 'a_ privileged lite from the unprotected' and disenfranchised mass, and there is a concentration of the means of produc. Yon and of capital in the hands of the State, which him succumbs, the foreign statesman no less than the German citizen, "But hho asks, when in all these years has Hiller performed one single act of reconciliation or generosity or good heartedness towards an opponent? And it is only generosity that can bring heating snd reconciliation the end, and close wounds which, really great things were at issue, were perhaps inevitable, The Proper Aim Rauschning takes comfort in the thought that. no revolution can last for ever, and that. those. institutions alone can be permanent that serve spiritual and not "biological" prin= ciples, that serve justice and equity, and voluntarily accept limits to their own authority. "Not a maximum of Power and dominion, but freedom and Justice, 1s the proper aim of any reordering of Europe and he sees in the British Empire, with its methods government based on freedom and consent, and with the moral authority of its "centre, an example which comes very close to an almost spiritual conception of the State and social order,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.