he enjoyment of the most happy life and the greatest possible
diminution of all bodily suffering. The State will be regarded as a sort
of assurance office, which guarantees a life of undisturbed possession
and enjoyment in the widest meaning of the word. We must endorse the
view which Wilhelm von Humboldt professed in his treatise on the limits
of the activity of the State.[D] The compulsory functions of the State
must be limited to the assurance of property and life. The State will be
considered as a law-court, and the individual will be inclined to shun
war as the greatest conceivable evil.

[Footnote D: W. von Humboldt, "Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der
Wirksamkelt des Staates zu bestimmen."]

If, on the contrary, we consider the life of men and of States as merely
a fraction of a collective existence, whose final purpose does not rest
on enjoyment, but on the development of intellectual and moral powers,
and if we look upon all enjoyment merely as an accessory of the
chequered conditions of life, the task of the State will appear in a
very different light. The State will not be to us merely a legal and
social insurance office, political union will not seem to us to have the
one object of bringing the advantages of civilization within the reach
of the individual; we shall assign to it the nobler task of raising the
intellectual and moral powers of a nation to the highest expansion, and
of securing for them that influence on the world which tends to the
combined progress of humanity. We shall see in the State, as Fichte
taught, an exponent of liberty to the human race, whose task it is to
put into practice the moral duty on earth. "The State," says Treitschke,
"is a moral community. It is called upon to educate the human race by
positive achievement, and its ultimate object is that a nation should
develop in it and through it into a real character; that is, alike for
nation and individuals, the highest moral task."

This highest expansion can never be realized in pure individualism. Man
can only develop his highest capacities when he takes his part in a
community, in a social organism, for which he lives and works. He must
be in a family, in a society, in the State, which draws the individual
out of the narrow circles in which he otherwise would pass his life, and
makes him a worker in the great common interests of humanity. The State
alone, so Schleiermacher once taught, gives the individual the highest
degr