At the beginning of modern times the power of the state became more and more concentrated. This could happen in England all the easier because the Norman kings had already strongly centralized the administration. As early as the end of the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Smith could speak of the unrestricted power of the English Parliament,[108] which Coke a little later declared to be "absolute and transcendent".[109]

But this power was thought of by Englishmen as unlimited only in a nominal legal sense. That the state, and therefore Parliament and the King have very real restrictions placed upon them has been at all times in England a live conviction of the people.

Magna Charta declares that the liberties and rights conceded by it are granted "in perpetuum".[110] In the Bill of Rights it was ordained that everything therein contained should "remain the law of this realm forever".[111] In spite of the nominal omnipotence of the state a limit which it shall not over-step is specifically demanded and recognized in the most important fundamental laws.

In these nominally legal but perfectly meaningless stipulations, the old Teutonic legal conception of the state's limited sphere of activity finds expression.

The movement of the Reformation was also based on the idea of the restriction of the state. Here, however, there entered the conception of a second restriction which was conditioned by the entire historical development. The mediaeval state found restrictions not only in the strength of its members, but also in the sphere of the church. The question as to how far the state's right extended in spiritual matters could only be fully raised after the Reformation, because through the Reformation those limits which had been fixed in the Middle Ages again became disputable. The new defining of the religious sphere and the withdrawal of the state from that sphere were also on the lines of necessary historical development.

So the conception of the superiority of the individual over against the state found its support in the entire historical condition of England in the seventeenth century. The doctrines of a natural law attached themselves to the old conceptions of right, which had never died, and brought them out in new form.

The same is true of the theories that arose on the Continent. Since the predominance of the historical school, one is accustomed to look upon the doctrines of a natural law as impossible dreaming. But an important fact is thereby overlooked, that no theory, no matter how abstract it may seem, which wins influence upon its time can do so entirely outside of the field of historical reality.

An insight into these historical facts is of the greatest importance for a correct legal comprehension of the relation of the state and the individual. There are here two possibilities, both of which can be logically carried out. According to the one the entire sphere of right of the individual is the product of state concession and permission. According to the other the state not only engenders rights of the individual, but it also leaves the individual that measure of liberty which it does not itself require in the interest of the whole. This liberty, however, it does not create but only recognizes.

The first conception is based upon the idea of the state's omnipotence as it was most sharply defined in the absolutist doctrines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its extreme consequence has been drawn by the poet in his question of law:

"Jahrelang schon bedien' ich mich meiner Nase zum Riechen; Hab' ich denn wirklich an sie auch ein erweisliches Recht?"[112]

The second theory on the other hand is that of the Teutonic conception of right corresponding to the historical facts of the gradual development of the state's power. If natural right is identical with non-historical right, then the first doctrine is for the modern state that of natural right, the second that of historical right. However much the boundaries of that recognized liberty have changed in the course of time, the consciousness that such boundaries existed was never extinguished in the Teutonic peoples even at the time of the absolute state.[113]

This liberty accordingly was not created but recognized, and recognized in the self-limitation of the state and in thus defining the intervening spaces which must necessarily remain between those rules with which the state surrounds the individual. What thus remains is not so much a right as it is a condition. The great error in the theory of a natural right lay in conceiving of the actual condition of liberty as a right and ascribing to this right a higher power which creates and restricts the state.[114]

At first glance the question does not seem to be of great practical significance, whether an act of the individual is one directly permitted by the state or one only indirectly recognized. But it is not the task of the science of law merely to train the judge and the administrative officer and teach them to decide difficult cases. To recognize the true boundaries between the individual and the community is the highest problem that thoughtful consideration of human society has to solve.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 108: "The most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament ... all that ever the people of Rome might do, either in centuriatis comitiis or tributis, the same may be done by the Parliament of England, which representeth and hath the power of the whole realm, both the head and the body." The Commonwealth of England, 1589, Book II, reprinted in Prothero, Select Statutes and Documents of Elizabeth and James I., Oxford, 1894, p. 178.]

[Footnote 109: 4 Inst. p. 36.]

[Footnote 110: Art. 63. Stubbs, p. 306.]

[Footnote 111: Art. 11. Stubbs, p. 527.]

[Footnote 112:

For years I have used my nose to smell with, Have I then really a provable right to it?]

[Footnote 113: The idea of all individual rights of liberty being the product of state concession has been recently advocated by Tezner, Gruenhuts Zeitschrift fuer Privat-und oeffentliches Recht, XXI, pp. 136 et seq., who seeks to banish the opposing conception to the realm of natural right. The decision of such important questions can only be accomplished by careful historical analysis, which will show different results for different epochs,—that, for example, the legal nature of liberty is entirely different in the ancient state and in the modern. Legal dialectics can easily deduce the given condition with equally logical acuteness from principles directly opposed to one another. The true principle is taught not by jurisprudence but by history.]

[Footnote 114: Cf. more explicitly on this, Jellinek, loc. cit., pp. 43, 89 et seq.]

SECOND IMPRESSION.

FORD'S THE FEDERALIST.

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DISCUSSIONS IN EDUCATION

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Contents: Berlin; Hamburg; Schleswig; Luebeck; Crossing the Baltic; St. Petersburg; Winter; The Neva; Details of Interiors; A Ball at the Winter Palace; The Theatres; The Tchoukine Dvor; Zichy; St. Isaac's; Moscow; The Kremlin; Troitza; Byzantine Art; Return to France.

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