The German Constitution

[p. 479]

|479| one state, just as little does, in our times, the inequality of religion tear a state apart. Public power, as pure public law, has known how to separate itself from the religious power and its right, to obtain for itself subsistence enough, and so to arrange itself that it [the state] has no need of the church, and the church is again set in the condition of separation from it which it had in its origin from the Roman state.

According to the theories of the state, to be sure, which in our times have been set up partly by would-be philosophers and teachers of the rights of humanity, partly realised in monstrous political experiments, everything else — only the most important, language, culture, customs and religion, excepted — that we have excluded from the necessary concept of public power is subjected to the immediate activity of the supreme public power, [and indeed so] that it is determined by it, and that all these sides, down to their smallest threads, are drawn in by it.

That the supreme public power must exercise the highest supervision over the mentioned sides of the internal relations of a people and over their organisations determined by contingency and ancient arbitrary will, that they may not hinder the principal activity of the state, but that it must above all things secure this for itself and to this end is not to spare the subordinate systems of rights and privileges, goes without saying; but it is a great advantage of the old states of Europe that, in that the public power is secured for its needs and its course, it leaves to the own activity of the citizens of the state a free scope in particulars, in the administration of justice, in administration, and so on, partly with regard to the filling of the offices of officials necessary therein, partly to the conduct of current business and the handling of the laws and customs.

Given the size of the present states, the reality of the ideal according to which every free man is to have a share

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