finance, is really engaged with strict executive business. But the importance attached to the power of from time to time granting “supply,” on the ground that the assembly of estates possesses in it a _check_ on the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice and violence,—this importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial measures necessary for the state’s subsistence cannot be made conditional on any other circumstances, nor can the state’s subsistence be put yearly in doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were e.g. to grant and arrange the judicial institutions always for a limited time merely; and thus, by the threat of suspending the activity of such an institution and the fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for itself a means of coercing private individuals. Then again, the pictures of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception of a contract between rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the possibility of such a divergence in spirit between these two parties as would make constitution and government quite out of the question. If we suppose the empty possibility of getting _help_ by such compulsive means brought into existence, such help would rather be the derangement and dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government, but only parties, and the violence and oppression of one party would only be helped away by the other. To fit together the several parts of the state into a constitution after the fashion of mere understanding—i.e. to adjust within it the machinery of a balance of powers external to each other—is to contravene the fundamental idea of what a state is. § 545. The final aspect of the state is to appear in immediate actuality as a single nation marked by physical conditions. As a single individual it is exclusive against other like individuals. In their mutual relations, waywardness and chance have a place; for each person in the aggregate is autonomous: the universal of law is only postulated between them, and not actually existent. This independence of a central authority reduces disputes between them to terms of mutual violence, a _state of war_, to meet which the general estate in the community assumes the particular function of maintaining the state’s independence against other states, and becomes the estate of bravery.