Political liberty means that the _polis_, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am _rid_ of them. It does not mean _my_ liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my _despots_, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and _their_ liberty is _my_ slavery. That in this they necessarily follow the principle, "the end hallows the means," is self-evident. If the welfare of the State is the end, war is a hallowed means; if justice is the State's end, homicide is a hallowed means, and is called by its sacred name, "execution," etc.; the sacred State _hallows_ everything that is serviceable to it. "Individual liberty," over which civic liberalism keeps jealous watch, does not by any means signify a completely free self-determination, by which actions become altogether _mine_, but only independence of _persons_. Individually free is he who is responsible to no _man_. Taken in this sense,--and we are not allowed to understand it otherwise,--not only the ruler is individually free, _i. e., irresponsible toward men_ ("before God," we know, he acknowledges himself responsible), but all who are "responsible only to the law." This kind of liberty was won through the revolutionary movement of the century,--to wit, independence of arbitrary will, of _tel est notre plaisir_. Hence the constitutional prince must himself be stripped of all personality, deprived of all individual decision, that he may not as a person, as an _individual man_, violate the "individual liberty" of others. The _personal will of the ruler_ has disappeared in the constitutional prince; it is with a right feeling, therefore, that absolute princes resist this. Nevertheless these very ones profess to be in the best sense "Christian princes." For this, however, they must become a _purely spiritual_ power, as the Christian is subject only to _spirit_ ("God is spirit"). The purely spiritual power is consistently represented only by the constitutional prince, he who, without any personal significance, stands there spiritualized to the degree that he can rank as a sheer, uncanny "spirit," as an _idea_. The constitutional king is the truly _Christian_ king, the genuine, consistent carrying-out of the Christian principle. In the constitutional monarchy individual dominion,--_i. e._, a real ruler that _wills_--has found its end; here, therefore, _individual liberty_ prevails, independence of every individual dictator, of every one who could dictate to me with a _tel est notre plaisir_. It is the completed _Christian_ State-life, a spiritualized life.