First, the civil equality. The suppression of privileges of birth or of class. Titles of nobility have no other value except as a part of a name. Titles may not be conferred except as they designate an employment or a function. The state may no longer confer orders or honorary insignia and no German may accept a title or order from a foreign government.
Then come the individual liberties properly so-called; not only the right to come and go, but also the right to settle in any part of the Reich, to emigrate to any non-German country, to be protected from surrender to a foreign government for prosecution or punishment; guarantee against arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, and other penalties; the inviolability of domicile and correspondence.
In a third place, the right to freedom of activity; liberty to engage in work, commerce and industry; liberty of creed and conscience; liberty to practise religion; liberty of instruction; liberty to express publicly one’s thoughts by words, speeches, printed matter, figures, films and in any other manner; liberty of assembly and association.
In the fourth place the liberty of individual property. This cannot be expropriated except for the common good, by virtue of a legislative provision and must be indemnified.
The enumeration of rights and duties is complete, but the idea that prevailed at its adoption is different from that which inspired the authors of preceding Declarations of Rights. In recognizing the liberties of the individual, the object is no longer to protect him against the State, but to permit him to co-operate in the most effective fashion in the well-being of all.
This leads naturally to the imposition on the liberty of the individual of a certain number of restrictions hitherto unknown. On the other hand, it imposes on the state a certain number of new duties, the discharge of which affords, as corollaries, new rights to the individual.
I.—Individual rights are subject to certain new restrictions in the interests of the collectivity.—The individual is no longer merely entitled to work. It is his duty. This obligation is provided for by Article 1, par. 1, of the socialization law of March 23, 1919, which has become [Article 163], par. 1, of the Constitution. “Every German has, without prejudice to his personal liberty, the moral duty so to use his intellectual and physical powers as is demanded by the welfare of the community.”[49]
It is true, therefore, that personal liberty is conditioned. The draft of the socialization law submitted by the Cabinet did not contain these conditions, and the Social Democratic Minister, Wissel, in open session of the National Assembly, expressly rejected the principle of the liberty of the individual. In the same manner the Social Democrats and the Independents proposed amendments according to which the sole liberty guaranteed to the individual was that of choosing his profession; this one right availed of, the liberty of the individual was thereupon used up, and he must thereafter conduct himself exclusively according to the needs of community. But a coalition of all the representatives of the bourgeois parties organizing against the conceptions behind the Socialist proposal, the provision concerning the principle of the liberty of employment was introduced into the law of March 23, 1919, and into the Constitution.
Saving his personal liberty, therefore, every German also has work as his moral duty; that is to say, he should contribute all the economic work that he is capable of according to his physical and intellectual abilities. In addition, this work must correspond to a definite condition; it must be such as is “demanded by the welfare of the community.”