Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/524

 and we should never take a further step, if we had gone into the struggle singly, each for himself.

Now the State is precisely this contemplated unity and coöperation of individuals in a moral whole, whose function it is to carry on this struggle, a combination which multiplies a million fold the force of all the individuals comprised in it, which heightens a million fold the powers which each individual singly would be able to exert.

The end of the State, therefore, is not simply to secure to each individual that personal freedom and that property with which the bourgeois principle assumes that the individual enters the state organization at the outset, but which in point of fact are first afforded him in and by the State. On the contrary, the end of the State can be no other than to accomplish that which, in the nature of things, is and always has been the function of the State,—in set terms: by combining individuals into a state organization to enable them to achieve such ends and to attain such a level of existence as they could not achieve as isolated individuals.

The utimateultimate [sic] and intrinsic end of the State, therefore, is to further the positive unfolding, the progressive development of human life. In other words, its function is to work out in actual achievement the true end of man; that is to say, the full degree of culture of which human nature is capable. It is the education and evolution of mankind into freedom.

As a matter of fact, even the older culture, which has become the inestimable foundation of the Germanic genius, makes for such a conception of the State. I may cite the words of the great leader of our science, August Böckh: "The concept of the State must," according to him, "necessarily be so broadened as to make the State the contrivance whereby all human virtue is to be realized to the full."

But this fully developed conception of the State is, above all and essentially, a conception that is in a peculiar sense to be ascribed to the working classes. Others may conceive this conception of the State by force of insight and