We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
But, except at rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as possible be abated, as an intruder into the sphere of private enterprise which should be extruded, as an enemy to liberty which should be suppressed. It may readily be admitted that in days before the State had been democratized this hostile attitude was not without justification. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the State meant the Stuart monarch—L'État c'est Moi—and the interests of the Stuart monarch were by no means those of any of the nations that he governed. In the early eighteenth century the State meant the Whig oligarchy, and its members only too easily came to regard the welfare of the Empire as identical with their own prosperity. In the early nineteenth century the State meant the landed and moneyed magnates of the Tory aristocracy, and they had an extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith and the laissez-faire economists, together with that of their contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the nineteenth century school of scientific individualists not only demonstrated (as they did with extraordinary pungency and success) the extreme folly and incompetence of the main government departments of their own day; they also sought to establish the eternal and inevitable antagonism of Man versus the State, and to limit universally the functions of government to the irreducible minimum.
This attitude of hostility, however, ceased to have its old justification with the advent of democracy. The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 have so enlarged the electorate as to convert government into something approaching self-government, and the State has become the organized form of democracy itself. Hence the individualism of Milton, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Spencer is an anachronism. It is not remarkable, then, that, following Parliamentary Reform, the idea of the State revived in Britain with new force and in a new form—no longer stimulated by the pressure of extreme peril, but excited by the new possibilities of corporate democratic activity. The young lions of the Fabian Society in their optimistic infancy were filled with the idea of the State, and advocated State action in wide spheres of industrial organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded State-control and regulation of our world-wide commerce.
But the revival of the idea of the State, under the stimulus of Socialists, Imperialists, Protectionists, and others, was short lived. All these enthusiasts became disappointed and disgusted with democracy and with the State which it controls. Democracy did not move fast enough for them, nor always in the direction that they desired. Hence—and most markedly since the dawn of the twentieth century—a reaction against the State has set in. There has been, as we have already seen, an epidemic of passive resistance. Individualists of all sorts, together with Trade Unionists, Syndicalists, Clericals, Suffragists, No-Conscriptionists, Ulstermen, Nationalists, and other bodies, giving up the attempt to convert democracy and to secure their ends through the sovereign agency of the democratic State, are taking direct action, are proclaiming rival authorities to the State, and are threatening the very existence of the body politic. The outlook is ominous, and it needs to be steadily faced. The present moment, moreover, is peculiarly favourable for its consideration. For the sudden and unexpected return of extreme national danger has once again quickened in our midst the idea of the State, has revived the spirit of patriotism, has restored the national unity, and has reenforced the principle of civic service. We can see under the revealing searchlight of the war the anarchy towards which we have been drifting during the past ten or more years.
II. THE RIVALS OF THE STATE
The first rival of the State that calls for consideration is the Individual. His rights as against the government are still loudly proclaimed. "The chief message of 1915," says one of our leading individualists, Rev. Dr. Clifford, in a New Year's oration to his flock,[48] "is a clarion call to guard our personal and democratic liberties against the attacks of State absolutism." The idea of guarding "democratic liberties" against democracy itself is, of course, mere nonsense—one of those point-blank contradictions in terms which, though full of sound and fury, signify nothing. It is, however, unfortunately, typical of much of the loose thinking and vague talking indulged in by the leaders of those pestilent anti-patriotic unions and fellowships which infest and harass the country at the present moment. The idea of guarding "personal liberties" against democracy is not so palpably absurd; it does not involve a contradiction in terms. Moreover, it appears to have some relation to the admitted fact that the rule of a democracy may press very heavily upon some or all of its constituent members. Nevertheless, it is equally fallacious. It rests upon a false antithesis between the individual and the community to which he belongs. No such antithesis exists. "The individual," rightly says Mr. W. S. McKechnie, "apart from all relations to the community is a negation."[49] In similar strain, Mr. E. Barker contends that "a full and just conception of the individual abolishes the supposed opposition between the Man and the State."[50] Long ago Hegel exclaimed: "Our life is hid with our fellows in the common life of our people," and his true and fruitful conception forms the basis of the political philosophy of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. It is, also, the foundation of all that is good and enduring in present-day Socialism. The individual apart from society is a mere abstraction, like the "economic man" of the old economists.