The following is so well known that it can be stated briefly. The system of exchange by means of money matures into capitalism, and brings into being new classes in juxtaposition to the landowners; the capitalist demands equal rights with the formerly privileged orders, and finally obtains them by revolutionizing the lower plebs. In this attack on the sacredly established order of things, the capitalists unite with the lower classes, naturally under the banner of “natural law.” But as soon as the victory has been achieved, the class based on movable wealth, the so-called middle class, turns its arms on the lower classes, makes peace with its former opponents, and invokes in its reactionary fight on the proletarians, its late allies, the theory of legitimacy, or makes use of an evil mixture of arguments based partly on legitimacy and partly on pseudo-liberalism. In this manner the state has gradually matured from the primitive robber state, through the stages of the developed feudal state, through absolutism, to the modern constitutional state. (d) THE MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL STATE Let us give the mechanics and kinetics of the modern state a moment’s time. In principle, it is the same entity as the primitive robber state or the developed feudal state. There has been added, however, one new element--_officialdom_, which at least will have this object, that in the contest of the various classes, it will represent the common interests of the state as a whole. In how far this purpose is subserved we shall investigate in another place. Let us at this time study the state in respect to those characteristics which it has brought over from its youthful stages. Its _form_ still continues to be domination, its content still remains the exploitation of the economic means. The latter continues to be limited by public law, which on the one hand protects the traditional “distribution” of the total products of the nation; while on the other it attempts to maintain at their full efficiency the taxpayers and those bound to render service. The internal policy of the state continues to revolve in the path prescribed for it by the parallelogram of the centrifugal force of class contests and the centripetal impulse of the common interests in the state; and its foreign policy continues to be determined by the interests of the master class, now comprising besides the landed also the moneyed interests. In principle, there are now, as before, only two classes to be distinguished: one a ruling class, which acquires more of the total product of the labor of the people--the economic means--than it has contributed, and a subject class, which obtains less of the resultant wealth than it has contributed. Each of these classes, in turn, depending on the degree of economic development, is divided into more or fewer sub-classes or strata, which grade of according to the fortune or misfortune of their economic standards.