Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/253

 country’s altar: those who need to be compelled to this restitution only prove thereby that they have never been worthy to hold the trust committed to them.

To preclude the possibility of any misconception on this point, I shall at once set forth the highest principle of my views upon the Equality of Human Rights. The common trivial theory supposes the State to have been preceded by an imaginary lawless state of Nature in which mere force was the master;—the stronger appropriating all that fell within their grasp, and the weaker going away empty. The results of this state of lawlessness are afterwards confirmed by Law, which makes that just which in itself was absolutely unjust; and the State exists only for the purpose of protecting the powerful in the enjoyment of their hoards by whatever means these may have been accumulated, and of preventing those who went away empty from the division from ever acquiring any possession. Apart from the fact that this view is wholly unhistorical, at least so far as regards Modern History, and that according to this view, all right of property has arisen out of the previous establishment of the State; it is also opposed to Reason, and its opposition to Reason is very obvious in the expression which we have given to it above. Every man as such has a right to the possession of property; this right is equal in all men; whatever is convertible into property ought therefore by Right to be equally divided among all; and it is the gradual accomplishment of this Equal Division of that which Nature and Accident have divided unequally, towards which, under the guidance of Nature itself, the State is impelled by necessity and by the care for its own preservation.

All that I have now set forth in detail is that gradual interpenetration of the Citizen by the State which I have laid down as the political characteristic of our Age; and it is now your business to determine whether such is the actual