[p. 541]
|541| beer-house, accuses politics of an insecurity in faith and of a lawless inconstancy, or is at least partisan and therefore mistrustful of the form of right in which the interests of its state appear. If these interests are its own, it too will maintain the form of right; but those are the true inner driving force, not this.
If the philanthropic friends of right and morality had an interest, they could grasp that interests, and with them the rights themselves, can fall into collision, and that it is foolish to set the interest of the state or, as it is expressed with the word more odious to morality, the advantage of the state, against right.
Right is the advantage of the one state established and conceded by treaties, and because in the treaties in general the different interests of the states are established, but as rights these interests are so infinitely many-sided, they must, and with them the rights themselves, fall into contradiction, and it depends only on the circumstances, on the combinations of power, that is, on the judgement of politics, whether the interest and right coming into danger is to be defended with the whole force of power, against which the other side can of course also adduce a right, because it too has precisely the opposite interest that comes into collision, and thereby also a right; and war, or whatever it is, now has to decide, not which right of the two asserted by both sides is the true right – for both sides have a true right – but which right is to yield to the other. War, or whatever else it is, has to decide this precisely because the two contradicting rights are equally true, and so a third – and this is war – must make them unequal, so that they can be united, which happens by one yielding to the other.
The venerableness and moral power of rights may
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