Explore "The Goose Herd" by Hermann Sudermann on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
My dear man, I've been listening to you now for a long while and you / fill me with astonishment. You usually show -- more than I do myself -- an / honest wish to take things as they are. Then whence all of a sudden, in / making these nice observations of human emotions, do you draw this / idealistic illusion of yours?
It seems to me your levelling-down democratic sentiment has been / playing you a naughty trick again. You maintain, if I understand you / correctly, that there is not a profound difference in the way the / various social classes feel and express their feelings; while, as a / matter of fact, life proves the very reverse every day. Oh, it would be / beautiful as a dream if you were right. The ideals of brotherhood and / equality that I, the bred-in-the-bone aristocrat -- that is what you say / I am -- must necessarily consider mere figments of the brain, would then / be reality, or, rather, have already become reality; because the bit of / knowledge more or less cannot possibly produce an organic difference in / men's natures.