The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand the participation of private persons in state affairs. For it is as private persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to be taken, be they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a number of people or of the nation. The aggregate of private persons is often spoken of as the _nation_: but as such an aggregate it is _vulgus_, not _populus_: and in this direction, it is the one sole aim of the state that a nation should _not_ come to existence, to power and action, _as such an aggregate_. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of lawlessness, demoralisation, brutishness: in it the nation would only be a shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea, which however is not self-destructive, as the nation--a spiritual element--would be. Yet such a condition may be often heard described as that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense in embarking upon the question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it is not a brutish mass, but an already organised nation--one in which a governmental power exists--which should be presupposed. The desirability of such participation however is not to be put in the superiority of particular intelligence, which private persons are supposed to have over state officials--the contrary may be the case--nor in the superiority of their good will for the general best. The members of civil society as such are rather people who find their nearest duty in their private interest and (as especially in the feudal society) in the interest of their privileged corporation. Take the case of _England_ which, because private persons have a predominant share in public affairs, has been regarded as having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that country--as compared with the other civilised states of Europe--is the most backward in civil and criminal legislation, in the law and liberty of property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedom or rational right is rather _sacrificed_ to formal right and particular private interest; and that this happens even in the institutions and possessions supposed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of private persons taking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their concrete, and therefore more urgent, sense of general wants. But the true motive is the right of the collective spirit to appear as an _externally universal_ will, acting with orderly and express efficacy for the public concerns. By this satisfaction of this right it gets its own life quickened, and at the same time breathes fresh life in the administrative officials; who thus have it brought home to them that not merely have they to enforce duties but also to have regard to rights. Private citizens are in the state the incomparably greater number, and form the multitude of such as are recognised as persons. Hence the will-reason exhibits its existence in them as a preponderating majority of freemen, or in its "reflectional" universality, which has its actuality vouchsafed it as a participation in the sovereignty. But it has already been noted as a "moment" of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that the individuals rise from external into substantial universality, and form a _particular_ kind,--the Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mere individuals as such (after the _democratic_ fashion of election), but as organic factors, as estates, that they enter upon that participation. In the state a power or agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganic shape, i.e. basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.