render? The Law of Nature asks:
What need I not submit to from others? that is, What must I suffer?
The question is put, not that I may do no injustice, but that I
may not do more than every man must do if he is to safeguard his
existence, and than every man will approve being done, in order that
he may be treated in the same way himself; and, further, that I may
not do more than society will permit me to do. The same answer will
serve for both questions, just as the same straight line can be drawn
from either of two opposite directions, namely, by opposing forces;
or, again, as the angle can give the sine, or the sine the angle.

It has been said that the historian is an inverted prophet. In the
same way it may be said that a teacher of law is an inverted moralist
(_viz_., a teacher of the duties of justice), or that politics are
inverted ethics, if we exclude the thought that ethics also teaches
the duty of benevolence, magnanimity, love, and so on. The State is
the Gordian knot that is cut instead of being untied; it is Columbus'
egg which is made to stand by being broken instead of balanced, as
though the business in question were to make it stand rather than to
balance it. In this respect the State is like the man who thinks that
he can produce fine weather by making the barometer go up.

* * * * *

The pseudo-philosophers of our age tell us that it is the object of
the State to promote the moral aims of mankind. This is not true;
it is rather the contrary which is true. The aim for which mankind
exists--the expression is parabolic--is not that a man should act in
such and such a manner; for all _opera operata_, things that have
actually been done, are in themselves matters of indifference. No! the
aim is that the Will, of which every man is a complete specimen--nay,
is the very Will itself--should turn whither it needs to turn; that
the man himself (the union of Thought and Will) should perceive what
this will is, and what horrors it contains; that he should show the
reflection of himself in his own deeds, in the abomination of them.
The State, which is wholly concerned with the general welfare, checks
the manifestation of the bad will, but in no wise checks the will
itself; the attempt would be impossible. It is because the State
checks the manifestation of his will that a man very seldom sees the
whole abomination of his nature in the mirror of his deeds. Or does
the reader actu