THE EVOLUTION OF THE STATE.* 



Nearly six hundred years ago, on the banks of the most 

 famous river in Germany, the foundations of a majestic 

 cathedral were laid. Within a hundred years from that 

 time, a part of the building was consecrated, and thence- 

 forward the pilgrims to that sacred temple saw only an 

 unfinished shrine. Within the present generation, without 

 a change of plan, the name of the architect lost to 

 human knowledge, it has been completed in the precise 

 way in which it was designed, and presents the loftiest 

 example of pure Gotliic architecture to be found in Europe. 

 The traveler, who stands with wondering admiration within 

 its aisles, reflects that, when its deep foundation-stones 

 were put in place, the art of printing was unknown, the 

 works of Shakespeare were unwritten. Constitutional lib- 

 erty was yet to be conceived of. Pope Innocent IV. was 

 the real ruler of civilization, and the great majority of men 

 were slaves. Yet no more surely did the germ of this 

 magnificent structure lie perfect, yet unevolved, in the 

 thought of this unknown master of his noble art, than did. 

 the present structure of the civilized State lie dormant in 

 the rude elements of government which then existed. 



" The roots of the present," it has been said, " lie deep 

 in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who 

 would learn how the present comes to be what it is." The 

 State is what we make it, each of us, all of us. Of the 

 more than a billion people who live upon the earth, each 

 single being constitutes an independent, self-related center 

 to which subjective unit all the phenomena of the world, 

 including every other of the billion people, is objective. 

 There is an inside and an outside world. The one is wrapt 

 in subjective privacy. It is the secret penetralia of the 

 human being. It is known only to the ego. The other is 

 open to the perception and judgment of all mankind. To 

 its just measurement all of history, science, art, human 

 experience, invention and imagination contribute. 



* COPYKIGHT, 1890, l)y Jauies H. West. 



