rights of his fellows, a man may run with limbs free, and a fair field before him, to the goal of the "perfect character" and of the "orderly and beautiful life." He will have to run, he is not yet arrived there. No State compulsion and no State protection can make a good man of him. The State removes certain obstacles, and affords certain facilities of environment, but goodness must come of the inner workings of a man's own heart, which no magistrate can touch.

1

§ 79. "The State," writes Mr. Bosanquet (P. T. S. p. 150), " includes the entire hierarchy of institutions by which life is determined, from the family to the trade, and from the trade to... the University." And Green (P. P. O. p. 146), "The other forms of community which precede and are independent of the formation of the State do not continue to exist outside it, nor yet are they independent of it; . . . they are carried on into it."2 The State is the aggregate of all these human and temporal societies; and more than the aggregate, it is the organic unity of them all. In it they have their civil being. The State, thus amplified, is a very much wider thing than 'government.' The individual does not belong for all his tem1 Mr. Bosanquet says, 66 to the Church and the University." 2 Much as the life of the cell' is carried on into the body.

poral estate to government: he is never a mere government official: he is essentially something more than an organ of the executive. Nor is the family a government department, nor the res familiaris a driblet of the aerarium. Private life and domestic life are only in part subservient to political life. Both domestic and political life are ultimately ministerial to the private life of the soul, of the thoughts, speculations, and affections. Citizenship is meant to help us towards being more thoroughly men. The inner life of the soul in man is more valid and real than the outer life of external behaviour and public duty, not that the two lives can ever be divorced. But in the region of the external and temporal order there is nothing so noble as the State. Bad government abases the sense of nobility in a people. Vide, Domine, et considera, quoniam facta sum vilis, is one of the Lamentations of Jerusalem under oppression (Lam. i. 11).

§ 80. While a certain separation of States will be always necessary, and mutual competi tion, and even jealousy, a separation and jealousy, however, which may come in time to be rather of races than of States, we are progressing and shall progress, unless war throws us back, towards a commonwealth of civilised mankind. The organisation of the earth is a

nobler work than the organisation of any one State, and a better good both 'in itself' and 'to us'. It is well to adorn our Sparta,' because it is ours, and our first duty is to the land of our birth; but our human sympathies are not to be bounded by mountain ranges or oceans. Man's blood calls for man's love, be the containing walls white, brown, yellow, or black. The perfect State and the commonwealth of perfect States are ideals not to lose sight of. Far away as they seem, in them only can the perfection of humanity on earth ever be realised. All the world over, such aims as these stand out to unite in a common effort the good wills of men of all nations and creeds, - the decent housing of the poor; the regulation of the liquor traffic in the best interest of the consumer; sanitary reform; the conciliation of labour with capital; the protection of children and innocence; the discipline of youth after leaving school; the suppression of usury and commercial frauds and anarchical conspiracy and slavery. To these ends may Great Britain and America join their forces and lead the world! Logic and metaphysics are not our strong points,-Hegel complained that the English periodical, Annals of Philosophy, treated of the construction of fireplaces, — but, a French writer has remarked it, every Englishman you

meet is a political philosopher. Nowhere has the union of liberty and law been better understood than in this country. We are studious of statecraft, and over every sea and land we wander, giving and receiving lessons in government. With one or two exceptions, governments generally have gathered experience in the nineteenth century, and are wiser now than they were at the Peace of Amiens.

§ 81. "Neither the State, however, nor the idea of humanity, nor the interests of mankind, are the last word of theory," says Mr. Bosanquet (P. T. S. p. 332). I repeat it, when the State has done its best for humanity, more remains to do. The perfect working of the State can do no more than raise the individual to a platform where he shall be able, unimpeded, to develop for himself the intellectual and spiritual side of his nature, and to aid the like development of his fellow-men. Man is not a political animal all over (§ 73, note), nor are politics and economics the sum of human interests. By virtue of the spirit that is in him, man belongs to a higher order, and is referable to a higher society, than the civil and political. The State is not a union of souls. The State belongs to the visible, temporal, and material order. Souls are immortal, States are mortal. In a fine frenzy' the Platonic Socrates pours

out his complaint against statesmen like Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, that without provision for self-control and justice, they have pestered the city with harbours and dockyards and fortifications and tribute-moneys and the like trash" (Gorgias, 519 A). With Plato's φλυαριῶν we may compare St. Paul's σκύβαλα (Phil. iii. 8). Both terms are employed comparatively, not absolutely. St. Paul was not the man to cry down a Jewish education (cf. Acts xxii. 3), nor Plato the provisions for national defence.1 But they looked beyond these things to things immeasurably nobler. Justice and self-control are more germane to man, and touch him nearer, than the material securities of empire. The State sets store by justice, fortitude, self-control, and other virtues, but on public grounds rather than for their intrinsic worth. Intrinsically these virtues are perfections of the soul that is endowed with them they are good things in themselves. But the State values them as means to the order and prosperity of the commonwealth: consequently the statesman's solicitude is for

1

1 Dockyards and city walls he was too piλolákwv ever to appreciate (Laws, IV. 704; VI. 778 D).

2 Plato, or the author of the First Alcibiades (134 B), explains Plato: "It is not walls, then, or ships of war, or arsenals, that cities need for their prosperity, nor population, nor size, without virtue."

L