I And Thou

alone makes life possible for the enormous numbers of
men that have grown with it, would simultaneously be
destroyed.
—Speechmaker, you speak too late. Just a little time
ago you would have been able to believe in your speech,
now you no longer can. For, a moment ago, you saw as
I did, that the State is no longer led; the stokers still
pile in the coal, but the leaders have now only the
semblance of control over the madly racing machines.
And in this moment, as you speak, you can hear as I
do that the levers of economics are beginning to sound
in an unusual way; the masters smile at you with
superior assurance, but death is in their hearts. They
tell you they suited the apparatus to the circumstances,
but you notice that from now on they can only suit
themselves to the apparatus—so long, that is to say,
as it permits them. Their speakers teach you that
economics is entering on the State's inheritance, but you
know that there is nothing to inherit except the tyranny
of the exuberantly growing It> under which the 7, less
and less able to master, dreams on that it is the ruler.
The communal life of man can no more than man
himself dispense with the world of It, over which the
presence of the Thou moves like the spirit upon the face
of the waters. Man's will to profit and to be powerful
have their natural and proper effect so long as they are
linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation.
There is no evil impulse till the impulse hasbeenseparated
from the being; the impulse which is bound up with,
and defined by, the being is the living stufi of communal
life, that which is detached is its disintegration.
Economics, the abode of the will to profit, and State,
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