The German Constitution

[p. 597]

|597| political character of Germany. In the working-out from crudity to culture it came to a question [of] which of the two, the universal, the state, or the individuals, would gain the upper hand; in most European countries the state has won a complete victory, in some in an incomplete manner, in none, with the pretension of being a state, so imperfectly as in Germany. The condition of barbarism consists namely in this, that a multitude is a people without at the same time being a state, that the state and the individuals exist in opposition and in separation. The ruler as a personality is public power, and the rescue against his personality is again only the opposition of personality. In a cultivated state there stand between the personality of the monarch and the individuals the laws or universality; the individual deed of the monarch concerns all, burdens or injures all or benefits all. But that the monarch be at the same time public power or that he have the highest power, that a state be at all, is equivalent. The contradiction that the state be the supreme power and that the individuals not be crushed by it is resolved by the power of the laws; it is the disbelief in the power of the laws, arising from a lack of wisdom, that wavers between the necessity of giving the state the highest power and the fear that the individual be crushed by it. On the solution of this task rests all the wisdom of the organisation of states; but the first thing is that a state be, the first thing therefore that the power of the state be the highest; immediately in this, however, lies also that laws are;

7.

Religion

2. with regard to the general bond of the state, religion is an important determining ground of the relation of the individual provinces of Germany to the whole; the separation of religion has probably contributed most to tearing this bond of the state apart and to making this tearing apart legal, because the princes could find no better help for it than in the conscience of their subjects, or else because the times into which these religious separations fell were too unskilled to separate the church from the state and, despite the separation of faith, to preserve the state.

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