produced". The idealist theory, in short, is being attacked because it idealizes the actual, finds in it a perfection which is not there and thus stands in the way of reform.

This challenge, too, appeals to facts of experience in its support, and it is worth while for us to appreciate the nature of these facts. There is, first, the "international problem", which was barely beginning to be an ugly menace in the MidVictorian age but which has since turned Europe first into an armed camp and then into shambles. We have become acutely aware of how European commerce and finance, extending their operations into extra-European countries, have intensified national antagonisms in proportion as they have enlisted the support of national governments and thus added the power of armed force to the power of the purse. The dangerous relations between nation-states, each claiming absolute sovereignty, none brooking interference with its "honor" and its "vital interests", have come to loom larger in the minds of political thinkers than the relations of the citizen to the state of his loyalty and his love. But, secondly, even this latter problem has undergone profound transformation under the pressure of the "social problem". There is the class-struggle between organized "labor", seeking by the exercise of economic and political power to obtain a control over the conditions of its life, and capital" organized to resist labor's demands. Within each nation and between the nations the dominant phenomenon has become a struggle for power-whose will is to be

master.

All modern criticisms of the state are born of the profound Jissatisfaction with this condition of things. They aim at finding new forms of organization which shall better correspond to the demands of social and economic justice, which shall less readily foster antagonisms between classes and nations. And the criticism of actual states has inevitably extended to the idealist theory of "the state" as seeming to ignore, if not to. justify, the imperfections of the actual.

'E. Barker, "The Superstition of the State ", Literary Supplement of the Lon don Times, July 18, 1918.

To feel the force of these critical analyses of the state, we need not go the length of Mr. Bertrand Russell's sneer that the state consists of elderly gentlemen below the average moral level of the community, and that with increasing government control the state has become a "universal prison" in which conscientious objectors are the only free men. Far more solid and plausible are the theories which start from the multitudinous conflicts of interests composing the ever-shifting pattern of politics. The state, according to them, is an organization of human beings occupying a certain territory, of whom some govern and the rest are governed. The government, on behalf of the whole body, claims sovereignty, i. e., unlimited authority against all alien state-bodies as well as over all groups or organizations within the state which it governs. But an empirical scrutiny of the acts and policies of any government, i. e., of the men actually in control of power, leads to the conclusion that, though in theory they are functionaries of the whole body, organs of the common will, trustees of the common good, in practice they tend to identify the interests of the class to which they belong or of the influences to which they are accessible with those of the community as a whole. Though in theory they act with the consent of the governed and for the true good of the whole, in fact their actions can often not be effectively controlled by public opinion, and even wide-spread dissent may be suppressed by the exercise of force. The close union in modern politics of economic and political power lends color to this analysis. A society of which the organization is politically democratic but economically oligarchic is in an unstable equilibrium. Though theory, under the name of the "common good", may postulate a fundamental unity and harmony of interests, in actual fact rival interests are straining against each other to secure or maintain, as the case may be, control over the legislative and administrative machinery. Just as the movement for the emancipation of women has been one long struggle for the abolition of laws which, in imposing all sorts of economic and political disabilities on women, expressed

4 See his message on "War and Individual Liberty", in The Masses, July, 1917.

a false theory of their proper function and status, so the weapons by which organized labor compels governments to bargain and write the terms agreed upon into the fabric of the nation's laws are aimed not merely at the existing laws but at the inadequate theory of the welfare of the working classes held by those whose "rights" and "vested interests" are in the existing laws entrenched. In the ideal state, laws may fulfill their function of expressing impartially the common good, i. e., the equitably adjusted and harmonized interests of all. In every actual state, the law, in formula and judicial interpretation, not only lags behind the effects on human happiness of economic forces and the demands of enlightened public conscience but, as it stands, embodies a theory of the common good biased by the interests of those who have the power to make the law."

In the face of criticisms such as these, what defence can the idealistic analysis offer for the state? Its formula, "my station and its duties", great as were its services in giving a concrete content to Kant's empty "good will", yet seems to provide no criterion for distinguishing what is good and what is bad in different systems of stations. It defines the "good life" with equal aptness, be the citizen's state democratic or autocratic. It is neutral to that criticism and reform of constitutions and institutions of which the present world is full. It points out to

1 Another line of criticism starts from the relation of church to state (cf. H. J. Laski, The Problem of Sovereignty). Can any church the theology of which distinguishes between divine and temporal authority acknowledge the absolute sovereignty of the state? Let alone the control of doctrine by the state in an "established" church, does not any church by owning property become subject to a judicial control which may claim to extend even to its dogma? Is there not always here a danger of conflict between religious freedom and political authority? Where points of conscience and of faith come into play, that "beloved community" in which Royce found the core of religion ceases to be necessarily identical with the state of which the believer is a citizen. Men have renounced their citizenship rather than submit. There are too many historical instances of such conflict to make it selfevident that every citizen can find in his state the Kingdom of God on earth. (Cf. "The Kingdom of God has come on earth in every civilized society where men live and work together, doing their best for the whole society and for mankind. When two or three are gathered together, cooperating for a social good, there is the Divine Spirit in the midst of them." Bosanquet, Essays and Addresses, p. 121.)

a king that he has a function and an opportunity. It tells him to be a good king. It does not ask whether it were not better that there be no king at all. Or, to take an extreme example, could not a prostitute be said to have her station and duties? Her profession has almost always been tolerated and frequently regulated in the public interest. Reflection on this fact coupled with the unbroken history of prostitution gives point to the question. Social investigators say that prostitutes will he found to take a professional pride in satisfying their customers, in being "good" prostitutes, as other women are good mothers or wives. Clearly, the whole of civic morality cannot be compressed into the formula, "my station and its duties".

Bosanquet's handling of the problem of self-government exhibits a similar aloofness from the point of view of the student who, out of the social and political unrest of the present day, has become a critic and a reformer. To most of us the term suggests democracy, "government of the people by the people for the people". It invites to an analysis of representative institutions. It suggests constitutional experiments like proportional representation or the initiative and referendum. Yet this problem of the effective participation of the citizen in determining the legislative and foreign policy of his own state— a privilege which in the citizen of the Greek city-state Bosanquet well knows how to appreciate hardly attracts his interest in the modern nation-state at all. He praises the Greeks, in the first chapter of his Philosophical Theory of the State, for inventing the simple device of government by discussion and vote, with the minority acquiescing in the will of the majority, but in his analysis of the modern nation-state it receives no further attention. Yet he is well aware that philosophical interest in the state has flourished most at times when strong national sentiment has gone hand in hand with a movement towards democracy and the "sovereignty of the people". The influence of Plato has probably been decisive with him here. A citizen of an extreme democracy, Plato omits from his analysis of the ideal state every single feature of actual democracy

1 See "Some Socialistic Features in Ancient Societies" in Essays and Addresses.

with which he was familiar. There is no provision for government by discussion and vote. There is no opportunity for the mass of the people to have a voice in the management of their state. The rule of philosopher-kings is the rule of an enlightened bureaucracy. Granted that it would be good government, is their nothing in Mill's taunt that the worst parody of self-government is the good government of a wise and benevolent autocrat?

So, again, with Hegel, Bosanquet holds "the state" (which means, in practice, for each of us his own nation-state) to be the citizen's ultimate moral authority, the keeper, as it were, of his conscience. Hence, like Hegel, he denies that the same principles of conduct apply between states which apply between the citizens of a state or that a state can admit or consent to the creation of any authority above itself. That a state is not on all fours with the individual in the nature and conditions of its action may readily be granted. But what is the bearing of this on the practical problem of how best to give effect to the love of peace among the peoples and to their sense of common interests deeper than national divisions? Can nothing be done to curb aggressive nationalism and check the recurrence of war? Bosanquet's reply tells us, in effect, to work not for a supra-national organization but for a purification of the will of each state. A healthy state, he declares, is non-militant in temper. States are peaceful or warlike according as their internal condition is or is not one of stability and social justice. States in which the supreme, non-competitive, humanizing values-knowledge, art, religion, human sympathy between classes are dominant in the lives of the citizens will live in peace with each other. As for a supra-national state, it is bound to fail for lack of a common experience, such as enables men to understand each others' ways and make allowances for each other and work together under the same laws and institutions. But it may be suggested that this very condition, viz., a common experience and a recognition of common interests, has largely been supplied by the war. On force alone

1

1 Cf. the volume entitled Social and International Ideals, passim.