alized to the full."

But this fully developed conception of the State is, above all and
essentially, a conception that is in a peculiar sense to be ascribed
to the working classes. Others may conceive this conception of the
State by force of insight and education, but to the working
classes it is, by virtue of the helpless condition of their numbers,
given as a matter of instinct; it is forced home upon them by material
and economic facts.

Their economic situation necessarily breeds in these classes an
instinctive sense that the function of the State is and must be that
of helping the individual, through the combined efforts of all, to
reach a development such as the individual in isolation is incapable
of attaining.

In point of fact, however, this ethical conception of the State does
not set up any concept that has not already previously been the real
motor principle in the State. On the contrary, it is plain from what
has already been said, that this, in an unconscious way, has been the
essential nature of the State from the beginning. This essential
character of the State has always in some measure asserted itself
through the logical constraint of the course of events, even when such
an aim has been absent from the conscious purposes of the State, even
when opposed to the will of those in whose hands the power of control
had rested.

In setting up this conception of the working classes as the dominant
concept of the State, therefore, we do nothing more than articularly
formulate what has all along, but obscurely, been the organic nature
of the State, and bring it into the foreground as the consciously
avowed end of society.

Herein lies the comprehensive unity and continuity of all human
development, that nothing drops into the course of development from
the outside. It is only that that is brought clearly into
consciousness, and worked out on the ground of free choice, which has
in substance all along constituted the obscurely and unconsciously
effective organic nature of things.

With the French Revolution of 1848 this clearer consciousness has made
its entry upon the scene and has been proclaimed. In the first place,
this outcome was symbolically represented in that a workman was made a
member of the provisional government; and, further, there was
proclaimed universal, equal and direct suffrage, which is in point of
method the means whereby this conception of the State is to be
realized. February, 1848