consciously takes on the colour of its laws; he is its scholar, and, even in the inmost centres of his life, he feels its beneficent control. To separate himself from it in any particular, were moral suicide; to seek to have a 'private life,' or to call anything his own,' were to destroy the very medium of his moral being, to seek to play his part without a stage on which to play it. That is to say, social organisation is necessary to the perfection of the individual life; and the only perfect social organisation is the communistic State, which directly and immediately controls the individual, and recognises no rights, individual or social, but its own.

But the growing complexity of the ethical problem, the growing perception of the significance of personality, and the growing dissatisfaction with the State as the ethical sphere of the individual, led even the Greeks themselves to a revision of their view of the relation of the individual to the State. Greek ethics close with the cry of individualism and cosmopolitanism. The State proved its ethical insufficiency, as the individual discovered his ethical self-sufficiency; the outward failure co-operated with the deeper inward reflection, to effect the transition from the ancient to the modern standpoint. Christianity, with its universal philanthropy, its obliteration of national distinctions, its insistence upon the absolute value of the individual, its deeper and intenser appreciation of personality, added its new strength to the forces already in operation. The political societies of the ancient world were gradually supplanted by a Catholic ecclesiastical society. The Church to a large extent displaced the State, and reasserted on its own behalf the State's exclusive claim upon the life of the individual. Controversy was thus inevitably aroused as to the respective jurisdictions of Church and State. The Family, too, acquired a new importance and a new independence. The breakdown of feudalism-the political order of the Middle Ages was followed by the break-down of its ecclesiastical

order also, and the individual at last stood forth in all the importance of his newly acquired independence. Our modern history has been the story of the gradual emancipation of the individual from the control of the State, and its product has been an individualism in theory and in practice which represents the opposite extreme from the political socialism of the classical world. The principle of individual liberty has taken the place of the ancient principle of citizenship. We have become very jealous for the rights of the individual, very slow to recognise the rights of the State. Its legitimate activity has been reduced to a minimum, it has been assigned a merely regulative or 'police' function, and has been regarded as only a kind of balance-wheel of the social machine. Not that the individual has emancipated himself from society. That is only a part of the historical fact; it is no less true that the various extra-political forms of social organisation have assumed functions formerly discharged by the State. But the result is the same in either case-namely, the narrowing of the sphere of the State's legitimate activity.

Various forces have conspired to bring about a revision of this modern theory of the State in its relation to the individual and to the other forms of social organisation. The interests of security have been threatened by the development of the principle of individual liberty to its extreme logical consequences in Anarchism and Nihilism; the very life, as well as the property, of the individual is seen to be endangered by the gradual disintegration of the State; and the strong arm of the civil power has come to seem a welcome defence from the misery of subjection to the incalculable caprice of 'mob-rule.' Individualism has almost reached its reductio ad absurdum; the principle of the mere particular has, here as elsewhere, proved itself to be a principle of disintegration. That each shall be allowed to live for himself alone, is seen to be an impossible and contradictory conception. Experience has

taught us that the State is the friend of the individual, securing for him that sacred sphere of individual liberty which, if not thus secured, would soon enough be entered and profaned by other individuals. The evils of a nonpolitical or anti-political condition of atomic individualism have been brought home to us by stern experiences and by the threatenings of experiences even sterner and more disastrous.

The complications which have resulted from industrial competition, the new difficulties of labour and capital which have come in the train of laissez faire, have lent their strength to emphasise the conviction that the State, instead of being the worst enemy, is the true friend of the individual. The doctrine of the non-interference by the State with the industrial life of the individual has very nearly reached its reduction to absurdity. The evils of unlimited and unregulated competition have thrown into clear relief the advantages of co-operation; the superiority of organised to unorganised activity has become manifest. And what more perfect form, it is asked, can the organisation of industry take than the political? Only through the nationalisation of industry, it is felt in many quarters, can we secure that liberty and equality which capitalism has destroyed; only by making the State the common guardian, can we hope for an emancipation from that industrial slavery which now degrades and impoverishes the lives of so many of our citizens. Capitalism has given us a plutocracy which is as baneful as any political despotism the world has seen; we have escaped from the serfdom of the feudal State, only to fall into the new serfdom of an unregulated industrialism.

The evils of leaving everything to private enterprise force themselves upon our attention, especially in the case of what are generally called public interests-those branches of activity which obviously affect all alike, such as the means of communication, railways, roads, and telegraphs. A more careful reflection, however, discovers a

certain public value in all forms of industry, even in those which are apparently most private. That mutual industrial dependence of each on all and all on each, in which Plato found the basis of the State, has once more come to constitute a powerful plea for the necessity of political organisation; and we have a new State-socialism which maintains that the equal interests of each can be conserved only by the sacrifice of all private interests to the public interest, that only by disallowing the distinction between meum and tuum, and indentifying the interest of each with that of all, can we hope to establish the reign of justice among men.

One other force has contributed to the change of standpoint which we are considering, namely, the changed conception of the State itself. The progress towards individual freedom has at the same time been a progress towards the true form of the State; and as the oligarchical and despotic have yielded to the democratic type of government, it has been recognised that the State is not an alien force imposed upon the individual from without, but that, in their true being, the State and the individual are identical. Upon the ruins of the feudal State the individual has at length built for himself a new State, a form of government to which he can yield a willing obedience, because it is the creation of his own will, and, in obeying it, he is really obeying himself. L'état c'est moi.

Such causes as these have led to the return, in our own time, to the classical conception of the State and its functions, and to the substitution of the question of the rights of the State for the question of the rights of the individual. The tendency of contemporary thought and effort is, on the whole, to extend the political organisation of society, to socialise the State or to nationalise society. What, then, we are forced to ask, is the ethical basis of the State? What, in its principle and idea, is it? If we can answer this question of the ethical basis of the State, we shall not find much difficulty in determining,

on general lines, its ethical functions, whether negative or positive, whether in the sphere of justice or in that of benevolence.

7. Is the State an end-in-itself ?-From an ethical standpoint the State must be regarded as a means, not as in itself an end. The State exists for the sake of the person, not the person for the sake of the State. The ethical unit is the person; and the mission of the State is not to supersede the person, but to aid him in the development of his personality-to give him room and opportunity. It exists for him, not he for it; it is his sphere, the medium of his moral life. Here there is no real difference between the ancient and the modern views of the State; in principle they are one. For Plato and Aristotle, as for ourselves, the State is the sphere of the ethical life, the true State is the complement of the true individual-his proper milieu. The Hellenic State, it is true, as it actually existed and even as Plato idealised it, contradicts in some measure our conception of personality; but it did not contradict the Greek conception of personality. From our modern standpoint, we find it inadequate for two reasons. It exists only for the few, the many exist for it: the Greek State is, in our view, an exclusive aristocracy, from the privileges of whose citizenship the majority are excluded. Yet, in the last analysis, we find that the end for which the State exists is the person; those who exist merely for the State are not regarded as persons. If the Greeks could have conceived the modern extension of the idea of personality, it is safe to say that they would have entirely agreed with the modern interpretation of the relation of the State to the individual. In the second place, it is to be noted that, with all their intellectual and aesthetic appreciation, the Greeks had not yet so fully discovered the riches of the ethical life. With our profounder appreciation of the significance of personality, the merely instrumental value of the State