III
At the same time that these independent nucleations of authority are increasingly afoot within the body politic, we observe in recent times a seemingly opposite tendency to impute competency to the state in regions where hitherto its writ was not supposed to run. To a purist political philosophy, the function of the state is broadly twofold—the preservation of domestic order and the safeguarding of national interests with reference to other nations. But it has latterly more and more stretched out its tabernacle to cover other matters; even going so far as to assume that a positive and comprehensive culture of national life came legitimately within its domain. That this should be so in a dynastic state like the German is easily understood; for the security and pretensions of the dynasty are dependent upon an intense development of human and material resources for military defence and offence. But even where such particularist designs have not been so obtrusively present, the state has tended more and more to absorb into itself the control and organisation of national life in all its important phases. It has, for instance, taken upon its shoulders almost the entire burden of public education; it has conspicuously concentrated its thought and wisdom upon measures designed to increase the material prosperity of the nation—though in point of fact this has worked out chiefly as the prosperity of a few favourably situated persons. The care of the destitute, old age pensions, health and unemployment insurance have been included within its competency; and its apparently insatiable absorbent proclivity is drawing into its capacious hands the control and operation of the means of communication, the postal service, the railways, telegraph and telephones. Plainly this extension of its office has been accompanied by a large and indefinite increment of authority.
For this movement, two circumstances appear to be accountable. Of these the first is the growth of an ill-defined and only partially understood sense of collective responsibility for the well-being of the social whole. Old Age Pensions, for instance, appear to constitute the proper alternative to the precarious charity or the degrading “poor relief” to which a less self-respecting social past committed the industrial veteran. The means of communication similarly appear to a reasonably educated community to be a public service rather than a gold-mine for private individuals or concerns. The second circumstance is the prestige which accrued to the state from the reaction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the bankrupt individualism of the preceding generations. In their recoil from the anarchy of laissez faire and industrial competition men sought sanctuary in the state; and in the event the state gained a repute for competency which led to a facile transference to it of all those interests that appear to bear materially upon the life of the community as a whole. But without prejudice to the question of public ownership, it may be observed that while the impulse which led to this regard for the state was natural and admirable, it had the effect of concentrating in the state a volume of power which was entirely ominous to the liberties of the individual. Indeed, it may be said without much hesitation that the logic of state-absolutism was revealed by the Germans only in time to save their neighbours from the like tragedy of incontinent subjection to the state. And the sense of personal responsibility was in danger of atrophy under the pleasing and soporific influence of the popular idea that the state was a sort of fairy god-mother who could be trusted to step in and make good individual derelictions and delinquencies—which frame of mind accorded well with the related drift towards unquestioning submission to the state.