The monarch in the person of the "royal master" had been a paltry monarch compared with this new monarch, the "sovereign nation." This _monarchy_ was a thousand times severer, stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch there was no longer any right, any privilege at all; how limited the "absolute king" of the _ancien régime_ looks in comparison! The Revolution effected the transformation of _limited monarchy_ into _absolute monarchy_. From this time on every right that is not conferred by this monarch is an "assumption"; but every prerogative that he bestows, a "right." The times demanded _absolute royalty_, absolute monarchy; therefore down fell that so-called absolute royalty which had so little understood how to become absolute that it remained limited by a thousand little lords.
What was longed for and striven for through thousands of years,--to wit, to find that absolute lord beside whom no other lords and lordlings any longer exist to clip his power,--the _bourgeoisie_ has brought to pass. It has revealed the Lord who alone confers "rightful titles," and without whose warrant _nothing is justified_. "So now we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other god save the one."[71]
Against _right_ one can no longer, as against a right, come forward with the assertion that it is "a wrong." One can say now only that it is a piece of nonsense, an illusion. If one called it wrong, one would have to set up _another right_ in opposition to it, and measure it by this. If, on the contrary, one rejects right as such, right in and of itself, altogether, then one also rejects the concept of wrong, and dissolves the whole concept of right (to which the concept of wrong belongs).
What is the meaning of the doctrine that we all enjoy "equality of political rights"? Only this,--that the State has no regard for my person, that to it I, like every other, am only a man, without having another significance that commands its deference. I do not command its deference as an aristocrat, a nobleman's son, or even as heir of an official whose office belongs to me by inheritance (as in the Middle Ages countships, etc., and later under absolute royalty, where hereditary offices occur). Now the State has an innumerable multitude of rights to give away, _e. g._ the right to lead a battalion, a company, etc.; the right to lecture at a university; and so forth; it has them to give away because they are its own, _i. e._ State rights or "political" rights. Withal, it makes no difference to it to whom it gives them, if the receiver only fulfils the duties that spring from the delegated rights. To it we are all of us all right, and--_equal_,--one worth no more and no less than another. It is indifferent to me who receives the command of the army, says the sovereign State, provided the grantee understands the matter properly. "Equality of political rights" has, consequently, the meaning that every one may acquire every right that the State has to give away, if only he fulfils the conditions annexed thereto,--conditions which are to be sought only in the nature of the particular right, not in a predilection for the person (_persona grata_): the nature of the right to become an officer brings with it, _e. g._, the necessity that one possess sound limbs and a suitable measure of knowledge, but it does not have noble birth as a condition; if, on the other hand, even the most deserving commoner could not reach that station, then an inequality of political rights would exist. Among the States of to-day one has carried out that maxim of equality more, another less.