Those who juggle with words, who talk dark and mysterious nonsense about the concept of the state, or dogmatize fanatically on the subject, contemptuously call this conception of the nature of the state and the relation of its citizens to it shallow rationalism, and from the heights of their supposed knowledge they look down disdainfully upon arguments which they libellously call the laymen's babble. They are only in part bumptious fools who pretend that uncritical, parrotlike repetition of traditional formulæ is erudition and confused thought is profundity, and who declare the clear-headed men who mock their silly mysticism, their superstitious dread of word phantoms, to be simply incapable of understanding their depth. Partly they are very sly toadies, very cunning sycophants of power, or ruthless egoists, unscrupulous freebooters, who pretend to be enthusiastic and devout apostles of the divinity of the state and demand the most humble submission, adoration and unconditional devotion in order that, as priests in its temple, they may grind their own axes at its altars. Such are those folk who maintain the double thesis that the state is everything, the individual nothing, the former the sole reality, the latter without any separate existence, and that the state, as mankind's highest form of existence, need recognize nothing as superior to itself, neither right nor law, and may therefore take as sole guide for its actions its own interests and not Morality. You cannot maintain a single one of these contentions unless you and all men are deprived of reasoning power; they crumble away instantly in the light of Reason. It is not true that the state alone is real and that it is superior to the individual, not only because of the forces at its disposal, the complex of which it represents, but also as an entity, as a thought, a principle. The individual alone in the species, that is, living, feeling, thinking and acting man, is real. The individual created the state out of himself. He can also destroy it. The practical politicians above all people should be of this opinion; as he can do it, he may do it; as he has the power to do it, he has the right to do it. The individualist will not make this a question of law, but will simply assert that, though the individual is the father of the state, yet he has no reasonable grounds for destroying it, so long as it makes no murderous attacks on its creator. The individual did not create the state consciously, intentionally and formally by means of a social contract, but naturally and organically, under pressure of circumstances. It is clearly to his interests to maintain it, to furnish the necessary means for its existence and efficiency, but always on the one condition that the state should really protect and promote the interests of the individual, lighten his burdens in the struggle for existence, and make that prosperity, comfort and happiness possible