* * * * *
In this only true State, all temptation to evil in general, and even
the possibility of deliberately determining upon an evil act, will be
cut off, and man be persuaded as powerfully as he can be to direct his
will toward good. There is no man who loves evil because it is evil.
He loves in it only the advantages and enjoyments which it promises,
and which, in the present state of Humanity, it, for the most part,
actually affords. As long as this state continues, as long as a price
is set upon vice, a thorough reformation of mankind, in the whole, is
scarcely to be hoped for. But in such a civil Polity as should exist,
such as reason demands, and such as the thinker easily describes,
although as yet he nowhere finds it, and such as will necessarily
shape itself with the first nation that is truly disenthralled--in
such a Polity evil will offer no advantages, but, on the contrary, the
most certain disadvantages; and the aberration of self-love into acts
of injustice will be suppressed by self-love itself. According to
infallible regulations, in such a State, all taking advantage of
and oppressing others, every act of self-aggrandizement at another's
expense is not only sure to be in vain--labor lost--but it reacts upon
the author, and he himself inevitably incurs the evil which he would
inflict upon others. Within his own State and outside of it, on the
whole face of the earth, he finds no one whom he can injure with
impunity.
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