*** So town and country and principality have spoken. Instead of equalising the difference between the rights of the wood thief and the pretensions of the forest owner, it is found not to be great enough. The protection of the forest owner and of the wood thief is not sought to be placed on the same footing; the protection of the large and of the small forest owner is sought to be placed on one measure. Here the most minute equality is to be the law, while there inequality is the axiom. Why does the small forest owner demand the same protection as the large one? Because both are forest owners. Are not both, the forest owner and the forest thief, citizens of the state? If a small and a large forest owner, have not still more a small and a large citizen of the state the same right to the protection of the state?

When the member of the princely estate refers to France—interest knows no political antipathies—he merely forgets to add that in France the protective official denounces the fact, but not the value. Likewise the honourable speaker for the towns forgets that the field warden is inadmissible here, because it is a question not only of establishing a theft of wood, but just as much of estimating the value of the wood.

What is the kernel of the whole reasoning we have just heard? That the small forest owner has not the means to appoint a life-long protective official. What follows from this reasoning? That the small forest owner is not called upon to do so. What does the small forest owner conclude? That he is called upon to employ an assessing protective official who can be dismissed. His lack of means counts for him as a title to a privilege.

The small forest owner also lacks the means to maintain an independent college of judges. So let the state and the accused forgo an independent college of judges and let the small forest owner’s menial servant sit in judgment, or, if he has no menial servant, his maid, or if he has no maid, let him himself. Has the accused not the same right to the executive power as an organ of the state as to the judicial? Why then not arrange the court likewise according to the means of the small forest owner?

Can the relation between the state and the accused be altered by the penurious private economy of the forest owner? The state has a right against the accused because it confronts this individual as the state. From this there immediately follows for it the duty to conduct itself towards the criminal as the state and in the manner of the state. The state has not only the means to act in a way that is appropriate alike to its reason, its universality and dignity, and to the right, life and property of the incriminated citizen; it is its unconditional duty to have and to employ these means. From the forest owner, whose forest is not the state and whose soul is not the state’s soul, no one will demand this. – What is concluded? That, because private property does not have the means to raise itself to the standpoint of the state, the state has the obligation to descend to the means of private property, which are contrary to reason and right.

This presumption of private interest, whose penurious soul has never been illumined or transfixed by a single thought of state, is a serious and thorough lesson for the state. If the state, even in only one point, so far lowers itself as to act, instead of in its own manner, in the manner of private property, it follows immediately that it must accommodate itself in the form of its means to the limits of private property. Private interest is cunning enough to press this consequence to the point where, in its most restricted and penurious shape, it makes itself the limit and the rule of state action—from which, apart from the complete degradation of the state, it follows conversely that the means most contrary to reason and right are set in motion against the accused, for the highest consideration for the interest of restricted private property necessarily turns into boundless lack of consideration for the interest of the accused. If it becomes clearly apparent here that private interest wants to, and must, degrade the state into the means of private interest, how should it not follow that a representation of private interests, the estates, wants to, and must, degrade the state to the thoughts of private interest? Every modern state, however little it may correspond to its concept, will, at the first practical attempt at such legislative power, be compelled to cry out: Your ways are not my ways, and your thoughts are not my thoughts!

How utterly untenable the hiring of the denouncing protective official is we can demonstrate no more strikingly than by a reason that is advanced against life-long appointment—we cannot say slipped out, for it is read out. For a member of the estate of the towns read out the following remark:

“The forest wardens appointed for life for communes are not, and cannot be, under such strict control as the royal officials. Every spur to the faithful discharge of duty is paralysed by life-long appointment. If the forest warden does only half his duty and takes care that no actual offenses can be laid to his charge, he will always find so many intercessors that a motion for his dismissal according to § 56 will be in vain. Under such circumstances, the parties concerned will not even dare to make the motion.”

We recall how full confidence was decreed in the denouncing protective official when the question was to leave the assessment to him. We recall that § 4 was a vote of confidence for the protective official.

For the first time we learn that the denouncing protective official requires control, and strict control. For the first time he appears not only as a man, but as a horse, spurs and bread being the only irritaments of his conscience and his duty-muscles being not merely unstrung but completely paralysed by life-long appointment. One sees that selfishness possesses two standards and weights with which it weighs and measures men, two world-views, two pairs of spectacles, one of which colours everything black and the other colourfully. When it is a matter of handing other men over to its tools and glossing over ambiguous means, selfishness puts on the colourful spectacles that show it its tools and means in fantastic glory, and it fools itself and others with the impractical and charming raptures of a tender and trusting soul. Every furrow in its face is smiling bonhomie. It presses its opponent’s hand till it is sore—but it presses it sore out of trust. Suddenly, however, it is a matter of its own advantage, it is a matter of examining cautiously, behind the scenes, where the illusions of the stage disappear, the usability of the tools and the means. A rigoristic judge of men, it carefully and mistrustfully puts on the worldly-wise, black-colouring spectacles, the spectacles of practice. Like an experienced horse-dealer, it subjects men to a long, all-overlooking ocular inspection, and they appear to it as small, as pitiful and as filthy as selfishness itself.

We will not quarrel with the world-view of selfishness, but we will force it to be consistent. We will not have it reserve worldly wisdom for itself and leave the fantasies to others. We hold the sophistical spirit of private interest fast for a moment to its own consequences.

If the denouncing protective official is the man you depict, a man for whom life-long appointment, far from giving a sense of independence, security and dignity in the discharge of his duty, rather robs him of every spur to the fulfilment of his duty, what are we to expect for the accused from the impartiality of this man, as soon as he is the unconditional servant of your arbitrariness? If spurs alone drive this man to his duty and if you are the spur-bearers, what must we prophesy for the accused, who is no spur-bearer? If even you cannot exercise sufficiently strict control over this man, how on earth is the state or the persecuted party to control him? Does not what you assert about a life-long appointment hold all the more for a revocable one: “if the protective official does only half his duty, he will always find so many intercessors that a motion for his dismissal according to § 56 will be in vain”? Will you not all be as many intercessors for him as long as he discharges the one half of his duty, the safeguarding of your interest?

The transformation of the naive, overflowing trust in the forest warden into nagging, carping distrust reveals the point to us. It is not the forest guard to whom you have presented this monstrous trust, in which the state and the wood thief are to believe as in a dogma; it is to yourselves.

It is not the official position, not the oath, not the conscience of the forest guard that are to be the guarantees of the accused against you—no, your sense of right, your humanity, your disinterestedness, your moderation are to be the guarantees of the accused against the forest guard. Your control is his last and only guarantee. In misty notions of your personal excellence, in poetic self-rapture, you offer the party concerned your individualities as a means of protection against your laws. I confess that I do not share this novelistic conception of forest owners. I do not believe at all that persons are guarantees against laws; I believe rather that laws must be guarantees against persons. And will the boldest imagination be able to fancy that men who, in the exalted business of legislation, are never able for a moment to lift themselves from the oppressive, practically low mood of selfishness to the theoretical height of general and objective standpoints—men who already tremble at the mere thought of future disadvantages and reach for stool and table to cover their interest—that these same men will be philosophers in the face of actual danger? But no one, not even the most excellent legislator, may place his person higher than his law. No one is authorised to decree votes of confidence in himself that have consequences for third parties.

But whether you might even demand that particular trust be placed in you, the following facts may tell.

“§ 87,” a deputy of the towns declares, “he must oppose, for its provisions would give rise to long-winded investigations leading to nothing, whereby personal liberty and that of trade would be disturbed. One should not regard everyone from the outset as a criminal and not immediately presume an evil deed until one has proof that one has been committed.”

Another deputy of the towns says the paragraph must be deleted. Its vexatious character—“that everyone shall have to prove whence the wood came to him,” so that everyone appears suspect of stealing and concealing—grasps roughly and hurtfully into civil life. The paragraph was adopted.

Truly, you expect too much of human inconsistency if it is to proclaim mistrust as a maxim to its own injury and trust to your advantage, if your trust and your mistrust are to see with the eyes of your private interest and feel with the heart of your private interest.

Another reason is adduced against life-long appointment, a reason which is itself at odds with itself as to whether contemptibleness or ridiculousness marks it more.

“Also the free will of private individuals ought not to be so greatly restricted in such a manner, and therefore only appointments terminable at will should be permitted.”

It is certainly as gratifying as it is unexpected news that man possesses a free will that is not to be restricted in every manner. The oracles we have hitherto heard resembled the primeval oracle at Dodona. The wood dispensed them. Free will possessed no estate quality. How are we now to understand this sudden rebellious appearance of ideology—for in relation to ideas we have before us only the successors of Napoleon?

The will of the forest owner demands the freedom to deal with the wood thief at his convenience and in the manner most agreeable to him and least costly. This will wants the state to hand over the villain to him at his discretion. He demands plein pouvoir [full power]. He does not fight against the restriction of free will, he fights against the manner of this restriction, which restricts so much that it hits not only the wood thief but also the wood owner. Does this free will not want many freedoms? Is it not a very, an eminently free will? And is it not unheard of that in the nineteenth century one dares “in such a manner so greatly” to restrict the free will of those private individuals who give public laws? It is unheard of.

Even the stubborn reformer, free will, must join the retinue of the good reasons, whose standard-bearer is the sophistry of interest. Only this free will must have good manners, it must be a cautious, a loyal free will, a free will that knows how to arrange itself so that its sphere coincides with the sphere of the arbitrariness of those privileged private individuals. Free will is cited only once, and this one time it appears in the shape of a squat private individual who hurls wooden blocks at the spirit of rational will. What business should this spirit have where the will is chained as a galley slave to the rowing-bench of the smallest and most narrow-hearted interests?

The peak of this whole reasoning is summed up in the following remark, which turns the relation in question upside down:

“Royal forest and game officials may well be appointed for life; in the case of communes and private individuals this is subject to the greatest reservations.”

As if the sole reservation did not consist in the fact that here private servants act instead of public servants! As if life-long appointment were not directed precisely against the dangerous private individual! Rien n’est plus terrible que la logique dans l’absurdité, i.e., nothing is more terrible than the logic of self-interest.

This logic, which turns the servant of the forest owner into a state authority, transforms the state authority into servants of the forest owner. The structure of the state, the determination of the individual administrative authorities, everything must go topsy-turvy so that everything sinks down into a means for the forest owner and his interest appears as the determining soul of the whole mechanism. All the organs of the state become ears, eyes, arms, legs, by which the interest of the forest owner hears, spies, estimates, protects, grasps and runs.

To § 62 the committee proposes, as a concluding clause, the demand for a certificate of uncollectability issued by the tax-messenger, the mayor and two communal elders of the domicile of the offender. A deputy of the rural communes finds the use of the tax-messenger in contradiction with the existing legislation. It goes without saying that this contradiction was not taken into account.

In connection with § 20 the committee had proposed:

“In the Rhine Province the entitled forest owner shall have the authorisation to assign the convicts to the local authority for the performance of the labour owed in such a way that their working days are credited against, or deducted from, the communal road labour services to which the forest owner is obliged in the commune.”

The objection was raised

“that the mayors cannot be used as executors for individual members of the commune and that the labour of the convicts cannot be accepted as compensation for services that would have to be performed by paid day-labourers or service-people.”

The rapporteur remarks:

“even if it is a burden for the gentlemen mayors to compel the unwilling and incensed forest convicts to work, yet it is one of the functions of these officials to bring disobedient and malicious administrees back to their duty, and is it not a fine act to guide the convict back from the wrong path to the right one? Who in the countryside has more means in his hands for this than the gentlemen mayors!”

And Reineke behaved anxiously and sadly,
So that he moved many a kindly man to compassion;
Lampe, the hare, was especially distressed.

The Diet accepted the proposal.