For whom, then, was the moral law created and developed if not for these men--whose actions, although they spring from the same motives and aspire to the same satisfaction of self as those of all other men, can be fraught with consequences incomparably more evil, because they make use of the state machine for their purposes. Through the force and momentum given by the machinery of the state these actions are boundlessly augmented, their range being indefinitely increased and their results multiplied a thousandfold. The simplest logic shows that these men within the state machine, rendered so specially dangerous by their terrible armament and weapons, far from being liberated from the coercion of moral law, ought to be subjected to it with extraordinary severity, a severity which should be greater than that which suffices for the average man, in proportion as their power to do harm is greater than that of the man in the street.
Now all this time, rather carelessly, or at any rate weakly, I am making a concession to the pious devotees of the religion of the state, by speaking of the state machine,--a dubious expression, coined to deceive by rousing superstitious ideas. The phrase is a picture, a rhetorical figure that one must be careful not to take literally. There is no state machine. There is only a relation of men to one another and to traditional habits, organized rules of command, obedience and equable conduct--habits into which the community of men has fallen in accordance with the law of least resistance, in order to promote their own interests, at least theoretically, without being forced to exert themselves continually to form new judgments, decisions and arrangements which the ever-shifting, ever-changing conditions of life render necessary.
Here again, behind the word, we find men, always only men. Just as those who command, from whose will all state action emanates, are men, so also the instruments by which they carry out their decisions are only metaphorically speaking, levers and wheels, parts of a machine of steel and iron; in reality they are officials, soldiers and policemen, they are judges and bailiffs; in short, they are men. And these men, who in all private relations with their fellow men are sternly required to submit to the dictates of Morality and the demands of the Law, are the same on whom other men, the leaders of the state, impose the duty of breaking all these precepts and laws; as ambassadors they must deny and dishonour the signatures to treaties; as leaders or paid servants of the press bureau they must systematically spread lies; as attorneys of the state they must persecute and maltreat those who tell the truth; as policemen they must tear the fathers of families from wife and children and hunt them into the barracks; as soldiers they must invade a foreign land, murder unknown and innocent men, rob them of their property, burn down their houses, lay waste their lands, in a word, do everything that is punishable with prison and gallows; they must perpetrate all crimes which the aim and end of Morality and Law are to prevent and condemn. If one defends such action, where can one find the courage and the justification to require these men at one time to honour the Ten Commandments and at another to disregard them, to be criminals in the name of the state in the morning and to be moral private persons and law-abiding citizens in the afternoon? After all, they only have one nature, one mind, one character and one set of perceptive faculties.