disappeared, and the life is, even in these particulars, a personal life.

Thus interpreted, the coercion of the State is seen to be an extension of the coercion of nature. Nature itself disallows certain lines of activity, does not permit us to follow every impulse. The organisation of life in political society implies a further restraint upon individual tendencies to activity, a certain further organisation or coordination of the outward activities. But the organisation and co-ordination of the impulsive tendencies to activitythis is in the hands not of the State, but of the individual will. The right of the State to coerce the individual, in the sense indicated, is grounded in the fact that it exists for the sake of the interests of personality. As these interests are superior in right to the interests of mere individual caprice, so are the laws of the State superior to the instincts and impulses of the individual. State restrains the expression of the individuality, that it may vindicate the sacred rights of personality in each individual. Its order is an improvement upon the order of nature; it is more discriminating, more just, more encouraging to virtue, more discouraging to vice. The civil order foreshadows the moral order itself; it is a version, the best available for the time and place and circumstances, of that order.

The

And although the action of the State seems at first sight to be merely coercive, and its will the will of another, a closer analysis reveals the fundamental identity of the State, in its idea at least, with the ethical person. The sovereign will represents the individual will, or rather the general will of the individual citizens. Here, in the general will of the people, in the common personality of the citizens, is the true seat of sovereignty. The actual and visible sovereign or government is representative of this invisible sovereign. The supreme power in the State, whatever be the form of government, is therefore, truly regarded, the 'public person,' and, in obeying it, the

citizens are really obeying their common personality. The sovereign power is "the public person vested with the power of the law, and so is to be considered as the image, phantom, or representative of the commonwealth

and thus he has no will, no power, but that of the law."1 Obedience to the State is obedience to the citizen's own better self; and, like Socrates, we ought to be unwilling to 'disobey a better.' The apparent heteronomy is really autonomy in disguise; I am, after all, sovereign as well as subject, subject of my own legislation. The right of the State is therefore supreme, being the right of personality itself. For the individual to assert his will against the will of the State, is ethically suicidal. Socrates went willingly to death, because he could not live and obey the State rather than God; he accepted the will of the people that he should die, and saw in their will the will of God. Death was for him the only path of obedience to both the outward and the inward better.' The individual may criticise the political order, as an inadequate version of the moral order. He may try to improve upon, and reform it. He may even, like Socrates, 'obey God rather than man,' and refuse the inner obedience of the will. But, where the State keeps within its proper function, he may not openly violate its order.

9. The limit of State action.-If the State should step beyond its proper function, and invade, instead of protecting, the sphere of personality; if the actual State should not merely fall short of, but contradict the ideal— then the right of rebellion belongs to the subject. If a revolution has become necessary, and if such revolution can be accomplished only by rebellion, rebellion takes the place of obedience as the duty of the citizen. Even in his rebellion he is still a citizen, loyal to the law and constitution of the ideal State which he seeks by his action to realise.

Locke, Treatise of Civil Government, bk. ii. ch. xiii.

This contradiction may occur in either of two ways. In the first place, the action of the sovereign power may not be representative or 'public': it may act as a private individual, or body of individuals. As Locke again says: "When he quits this public representation, this public will, and acts by his own private will, he degrades himself, and is but a single private person without power, and without will that has any right to obedience the members owing no obedience but to the public will of the society." The true sovereign must count nothing 'his own,' must have no private interests in his public acts: his interests must be those of the people, and their will his. If he acts otherwise, asserting his own private will, and subordinating the good of the citizens to his own individual good, he thereby uncrowns himself, and abnegates his sovereignty. Then comes the time for the exercise of the supreme power that remains still in the people.' The necessity of the English and the French Revolution, for example, lay in the fact that the actual State contradicted the ideal, seeking to destroy those rights of personality of which it ought to have been the custodian, and before which it was called to give an account of its stewardship. At such a time the common personality, in whose interest the State exists, must step forth, assert itself against the so-called 'State,' and, condemning the actual, give birth to one that shall be true to its own idea, that shall help and not hinder its citizens in their life of self-realisation. The power returns to its source, the general will, which is thus forced to find for itself a new and more adequate expression.

This brings us to the second form of the contradiction between the actual and the ideal State. When the present formulation of the general will has become inadequate, it must be re-formulated; and this re-formulation of its will by the people may mean revolution as well as reformation. Such a criticism and modification of the State is indeed always going on, public opinion is always more or less active and more or less articulate; and it is the function

necessary.

of the statesman to interpret, as well as to guide and form, this public opinion. As long as there is harmony between the general will and the will of the government, as long as the government is truly representative of the governed, so long the State exists and prospers. As soon as there is discord, and the government ceases to represent the general will, so soon does a new delegation of sovereignty become "Emperors, kings, councils, and parliaments, or any combinations of them, are only the temporary representatives of something that is greater than they.”1 "The acts of the government in every country which is not on the verge of a revolution are not the acts of a minority of individuals, but the acts of the uncrowned and invisible sovereign, the spirit of the nation itself." 2 In the very indeterminateness of the general will; in the fact that no one of its determinations or definitions of itself is final, that no actualisation of it exhausts its potentiality or fixes it in a rigid and unchanging form, that, like an organism, it grows, and in its growth is capable of adapting itself always to its new conditions, that, like the individual will, it learns by experience and allows its past to determine its present,-lie the undying strength and vitality of that invisible State which persists through all the changing forms of its visible manifestation.

10. The ethical functions of the State: (a) justice. -The State, being the medium of the ethical life of the individual, has two ethical functions: (1) the negative function of securing to the individual the opportunity of self-realisation, by protecting him from the encroachments of other individuals or of non-political forms of society -the function of justice; (2) the positive improvement of the conditions of the ethical life for each of its citizens the function of benevolence. In the exercise of the former function, the State cares for the interests of 'being,' in the exercise of the latter it cares for the

1 D. G. Ritchie, Principles of State Interference, p. 69.

2 Ibid.,

p. 74.

interests of 'well-being'; and as the interests of being or security precede in imperativeness those of well-being or prosperity, so is the political duty of justice prior to that of benevolence. In the case of the State, as in that of the individual, however, the one duty passes imperceptibly into the other, and benevolence is seen to be only the higher justice. This relation of the positive to the negative function suggests-what a closer consideration makes very plain—that there is no logical basis for the limitation of State-action to justice, and that those who would thus limit it are seeking artificially to arrest the life of the State at the stage of what we may call the lower and imperfect justice.

Even at this stage the activity of the State is, in its essence, the same as it is at the higher stages of that activity. Even here the function is not a mere police one; even here the State 'interferes' with the individual. To protect the individual from the aggression of other individuals and of society, the State must interfere with the individual, and be in some considerable measure 'aggressive.' Already the imagined sphere of sheer independent and private individuality has been penetrated, and the right of the State to act within that sphere established. While it is true that the preservation of the integrity of the individual life implies a large measure of freedom from government control, it is also true that the only way to secure such freedom for the individual is by a large measure of such control. If other individuals and non-political society are not to encroach upon the individual and destroy his freedom, the State must be allowed to encroach and set up its rule within the life of the individual. The tyranny of the individual and the tyranny of unofficial public opinion are incomparably worse than what some are pleased to call the tyranny of the State. The justification of State-interference in all its forms is, as we have seen, that it is exercised in the interest of individual freedom.