THE STATE EVEN in 1920-21 an accusation was brought against our young Movement by the bourgeois world now out of date—that our attitude towards the State was one of rejection ; from this the Party politicians of every colour argued that it was right to fight in order to crush the young, inconvenient champion of a new world-theory by every possible means. They had for¬ gotten purposely that the bourgeois world itself repre¬ sents that the State is no longer a homogeneous body, that there is and can be no consistent definition of the word. And yet in our State High Schools there sit instructors, in the shape of lecturers on State Law, who must find an explanation for the more or less happy existence of the State which pays them. The worse the constitution of a State, the sillier, more high-flown and less comprehensible are the definitions for its object in existing. How, for instance, could an Imperial-Royal professor once write about the meaning and object of the State, in a country whose State existence is the worst mon¬ strosity of the twentieth century ? A difficult task indeed !
It is possible to distinguish three groups among them :
First, the group of those who see the State as a more or less voluntary collection of people under a government administration. For them the mere exist¬ ence of the State constitutes its claim to sanctified inviolability. In support of this mad conception of the human brain, they observe dog-like adoration for “State authority”, so-called. Thus, by a turn of the hand, they convert a means into the final end. The State is not there to serve men, but men are there for the purpose of worshipping a State authority which clothes, as it were, a kind of ultimate spirit of officialdom.