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140
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
and their liberty is my slavery. That in this they
necessarily follow the principle, " the end hallows the
means," is self-evident. If the welfare of the State is
the end, war is a hallowed means ; if justice is the
State's end, homicide is a hallowed means, and is
called by its sacred name, "execution," etc.; the
sacred State hallows everything that is serviceable
to it.
" Individual liberty," over which civic liberalism
keeps jealous watch, does not by any means signify a
completely free self-determination, by which actions be-
come altogether mine, but only independence of per-
sons. Individually free is he who is responsible to no
man. Taken in this sense,--and we are not allowed
to understand it otherwise,--not only the ruler is indi-
vidually free, i. e., irresponsible toward men (" before
God," we know, he acknowledges himself responsible),
but all who are " responsible only to the law." This
kind of liberty was won through the revolutionary
movement of the century,--to wit, independence of
arbitrary will, of tel est notre plaisir. Hence the con-
stitutional prince must himself be stripped of all per-
sonality, deprived of all individual decision, that he
may not as a person, as an individual man, violate
the "individual liberty " of others. The personal will
of the ruler has disappeared in the constitutional
prince; it is with a right feeling, therefore, that ab-
solute princes resist this. Nevertheless these very ones
profess to be in the best sense " Christian princes."
For this, however, they must become a purely spiritual
power, as the Christian is subject only to spirit (" God
is spirit"). The purely spiritual power is consistently
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 141
represented only by the constitutional prince, he who,
without any personal significance, stands there spirit-
ualized to the degree that he can rank as a sheer,
uncanny " spirit," as an idea. The constitutional king
is the truly Christian king, the genuine, consistent
carrying-out of the Christian principle. In the consti-
tutional monarchy individual dominion,--i. e., a real
ruler that wills--has found its end ; here, therefore,
individual liberty prevails, independence of every in-
dividual dictator, of every one who could dictate to
me with a tel est notre plaisir. It is the completed
Christian State-life, a spiritualized life.
The behavior of the commonalty is liberal through
and through. Every personal invasion of another's
sphere revolts the civic sense; if the citizen sees that
one is dependent on the humor, the pleasure, the will
of a man as individual (i. e. as not authorized by a
" higher power "), at once he brings his liberalism to
the front and shrieks about " arbitrariness." In fine,
the citizen asserts his freedom from what is called
orders (ordonnance) : " No one has any business to
give me--orders ! " Orders carries the idea that what
I am to do is another man's will, while law does not
express a personal authority of another. The liberty
of the commonalty is liberty or independence from the
will of another person, so-called personal or individual
liberty; for being personally fee means being only
so free that no other person can dispose of mine, or
that what I may or may not do does not depend on
the personal decree of another. The liberty of the
press, for instance, is such a liberty of liberalism, lib-
eralism fighting only against the coercion of the cen-