But this same man, who has learnt to be a match for Nature, his creator, is powerless against his creature, the state. He can neither evade it nor escape from it. The state disposes of him without his consent, against his most obvious interests, in spite of his powerless opposition; it hurls him hither and thither, annihilates him, crushes him by its will and is unmoved by the will of the individual.
True, man has sought to maintain his right of self-determination against the forces of politics, as against all others that broke his will and intervened in his life without his consent. For thousands of years all state development has tried to protect the modest individual, lost in the crowd and featureless, but nevertheless a person, that is, a world to himself, against the arbitrariness of rulers or leading statesmen. That is the one unchanging tendency which leads from Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the slayers of a tyrant, the rebellion of the elder Brutus, the murder of Cæsar, by way of the Revolt of the Netherlands and the execution of Charles I of England, to the great Revolution, the risings of 1848 and the struggle for constitutional government in all states of the Old World and the New. The formula has long been discovered whereby the individual can maintain the dignity of his sovereign personality and his own responsibility for the shaping of his destiny. It is civil freedom, constitutionalism, sovereignty of the people. There are arrangements, carefully thought out, nicely weighed, cleverly worked out to the smallest detail, by which the individual is fitted into his place in the community without being deprived of the management of his own affairs, by which the sacrifices needful for the fulfilment of collective tasks are exacted without his being reduced to a condition of slavery, by which the independence of the individual is safeguarded and yet a state of chaos and anarchy is avoided.
But this formula fares as do the doctrines of science: hitherto it has remained a theory everywhere. The franchise, representation of the people, responsibility of ministers, constitutional limitation of the ruler's power, are infallibly effective weapons or instruments, but no people has yet learnt how to handle them rightly. That is why pessimists speak of the bankruptcy of civilization, that is why the aim of civilization, the liberation of the person and the enforcement of its sovereignty, has nowhere been attained, that is why, to quote Napoleon I in his interview with Goethe at Erfurt, "In our times the power of fate is politics." And yet all these institutions of a modern constitutional state, from the ballot-paper and the voting of taxes in Parliament to the enforced resignation of the ministry on a vote of censure and the oath of the ruler to observe the constitution, recognize the rights of the individual as opposed to the state, and at least theoretically give the lie to the bold declaration that the state is everything and the individual nothing.