Cologne, November 16. The stoutest champion of the “separa- 
tion of town and countryside” in the Kolnische Zeitung today again 
raises his rumbling voice, and today it is not the province but the 
Rheinische Zeitung which he selects for the honour of being the 
victim of his private intelligence and his private illusions. We 
believe the good man when he says that the reading of the articles 
on communal constitution in the Rheinische Zeitung* at breakfast 
numbed his head and hurled him back into “exceedingly confused 
dreams”. We believe that it is very inconvenient for one who 
knows Cologne and Bickendorf well to be bustled through the 
Orient, through Greece, Rome, the German Empire, Gaul and 
France and even through thoughts which necessarily appear as 
“sophistries” and “dialectical tricks” to the routine of practical 
intercourse and narrowly limited outlook. We do not want to judge 
this cheerful self-complacency amiss for the by no means moderate 
courtesies which it is capable of bestowing on its own achieve- 
ments, for it belongs to the character of narrow-mindedness to 
consider its own limitations as the limitations and the pillars of the 
world. And as our good and humorous friend adduces no new 
grounds but supports the view that a ground which has been 
rejected and refuted at its first presentation can, like an importu- 
nate petitioner, achieve its aim in the end if only it has the 
obstinacy to return again and again; as therefore our friend, true 
to the principles established in respect of newspaper articles, 
expects the effect of his well-worded and correctly ordered 

grounds not from themselves, but from their repetition, nothing 
else remains for us but finally to banish from the real world a few 
phantasmagoria that may have come to him in “sleep” and in 
“confused dreams” and so to contribute as much as is in our 
power to eliminating the reappearing belief in ghosts, which is 
known to confuse its dreams of things with the things themselves. 
Our somnambulist saw in a dream how the peasants were alerted 
by the Rheinische Zeitung to march with spades and hoes on the 
towns because the latter harboured tyrannical intentions. 

In his intervals of clear consciousness our somnambulist will 
have to agree with himself that the “towns” do not lie in the 
Kolnische Zeitung, that we have even rejected its arbitrary interpre- 
tation of the towns’ intentions, and that finally a work? which even 
goes beyond the range of vision of “one who knows Cologne and 
Bickendorf well’ is still less able to provoke the peasant to a 
demonstration with “spades and hoes”—which probably play 
their role as a sample of “unprejudiced views” drawn “from 
practical life and intercourse”. On awakening, our somnambulist 
will further find it beyond all doubt that to put right an alleged 
“correspondent” of the Kolnische Zeitung is no “distortion of the 
truth”, that provoking “dissatisfaction” with the Kolnische Zeitung 
and taking sides against its contemplative correspondent is no 
“arousing of dissatisfaction and frenzy of parties’ against the 
state; or can it be that not only the “towns” lie in the Kolnische 
Zeitung, but the state itself is embodied in it and its contributors! 
Our friend will then also grasp that one may have the “boundless 
arrogance” to irritate the literary productions of the sign——> 
without “challenging by indecent sallies” “the highest state au- 
thorities”, whom he makes responsible not only for his opinions 
but even for his arguments and who would like to disavow this 
self-styled ally. 

With the present level of German science it will be more than an 
upheaval if the hollow theories which strain to conceive themselves 
as the result of world history, and the general range of vision of 
today’s doctrine were to experience the bitter fate of finding their 
critical yardstick in the “unprejudiced” views, drawn from civil 
intercourse and practical life, of “one who knows Cologne and 
Bickendorf well’. This gentleman will find it understandable that 
pending the epoch of this Reformation and of the conjectural 

literary magnitude of the sign—.—, we consider his present 
isolated endeavours too fragmentary, and, with his permission, too 
insignificant in every respect to nourish and cultivate the dream of 
their importance by any further assessment of them.