There has been a steady tendency for the education of children to be regarded as properly a state charge in spite of the fact that children are primarily the care of a family. But the period in which education is possible to an effective degree is that of childhood; if this time is not taken advantage of the consequences are irreparable. The neglect can rarely be made up later. In the degree, then, that a certain measure of instruction and training is deemed to have significant consequences for the social body, rules are laid down affecting the action of parents in relation to their children, and those who are not parents are taxed—Herbert Spencer to the contrary notwithstanding—to maintain schools. Again, the consequences of neglect of safeguards in industries involving machines which are dangerous and those presenting unhygienic conditions, are so serious and irretrievable that the modern public has intervened to maintain conditions conducive to safety and health. Movements which aim at insurance against illness and old-age under governmental auspices illustrate the same principle. While public regulation of a minimum wage is still a disputed matter, the argument in behalf of it appeals to the criterion stated. The argument in effect is that a living wage is a matter of such serious indirect consequences to society that it cannot be safely left to the parties directly concerned, owing to the fact that immediate need may incapacitate one party to the transaction from effective bargaining.
In what has been said there is no attempt to lay down criteria to be applied in a predetermined way to ensure just such and such results. We are not concerned to predict the special forms which state action will take in the future. We have simply been engaged in pointing out the marks by which public action as distinct from private is characterized. Transactions between singular persons and groups bring a public into being when their indirect consequences—their effects beyond those immediately engaged in them—are of importance. Vagueness is not eliminated from the idea of importance. But at least we have pointed out some of the factors which go to make up importance: namely, the far-reaching character of consequences, whether in space or time; their settled, uniform and recurrent nature, and their irreparableness. Each one of these matters involves questions of degree. There is no sharp and clear line which draws itself, pointing out beyond peradventure, like the line left by a receding high tide, just where a public comes into existence which has interests so significant that they must be looked after and administered by special agencies, or governmental officers. Hence there is often room for dispute. The line of demarcation between actions left to private initiative and management and those regulated by the state has to be discovered experimentally.
As we shall see later, there are assignable reasons why it will be drawn very differently at different times and places. The very fact that the public depends upon consequences of acts and the perception of consequences, while its organization into a state depends upon the ability to invent and employ special instrumentalities, shows how and why publics and political institutions differ widely from epoch to epoch and from place to place. To suppose that an a priori conception of the intrinsic nature and limits of the individual on one side and the state on the other will yield good results once for all is absurd. If, however, the state has a definite nature, as it should have if it were formed by fixed causal agencies, or if individuals have a nature fixed once for all apart from conditions of association, a final and wholesale partitioning of the realms of personal and state activity is the logical conclusion. The failure of such a theory to reach practical solutions is, therefore, a further confirmation of the theory which emphasizes the consequences of activity as the essential affair.
In conclusion, we shall make explicit what has been implied regarding the relation to one another of public, government and state.[7] There have been two extreme views about this point. On one hand, the state has been identified with government. On the other hand, the state, having a necessary existence of its own, per se, is said then to proceed to form and employ certain agencies forming government, much as a man hires servants and assigns them duties. The latter view is appropriate when the causal agency theory is relied upon. Some force, whether a general will or the singular wills of assembled individuals, calls the state into being. Then the latter as a secondary operation chooses certain persons through whom to act. Such a theory helps those who entertain it to retain the idea of the inherent sanctity of the state. Concrete political evils such as history exhibits in abundance can be laid at the door of fallible and corrupt governments, while the state keeps its honor unbesmirched. The identification of the state with government has the advantage of keeping the mind’s eye upon concrete and observable facts; but it involves an unaccountable separation between rulers and people. If a government exists by itself and on its own account, why should there be government? Why should there persist the habits of loyalty and obedience which permit it to rule?
The hypothesis which has been advanced frees us from the perplexities which cluster about both of these two notions. The lasting, extensive and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public. In itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public. The officers are still singular beings, but they exercise new and special powers. These may be turned to their private account. Then government is corrupt and arbitrary. Quite apart from deliberate graft, from using unusual powers for private glorification and profit, density of mind and pomposity of behavior, adherence to class-interest and its prejudices, are strengthened by position. “Power is poison” was the remark of one of the best, shrewdest and most experienced observers of Washington politicians. On the other hand, occupancy of office may enlarge a man’s views and stimulate his social interest so that he exhibits as a statesman traits foreign to his private life.
But since the public forms a state only by and through officials and their acts, and since holding official position does not work a miracle of transubstantiation, there is nothing perplexing nor even discouraging in the spectacle of the stupidities and errors of political behavior. The facts which give rise to the spectacle should, however, protect us from the illusion of expecting extraordinary change to follow from a mere change in political agencies and methods. Such a change sometimes occurs, but when it does, it is because the social conditions, in generating a new public, have prepared the way for it; the state sets a formal seal upon forces already in operation by giving them a defined channel through which to act. Conceptions of “The State” as something per se, something intrinsically manifesting a general will and reason, lend themselves to illusions. They make such a sharp distinction between the state and a government that, from the standpoint of the theories, a government may be corrupt and injurious and yet The State by the same idea retain its inherent dignity and nobility. Officials may be mean, obstinate, proud and stupid and yet the nature of the state which they serve remain essentially unimpaired. Since, however, a public is organized into a state through its government, the state is as its officials are. Only through constant watchfulness and criticism of public officials by citizens can a state be maintained in integrity and usefulness.
The discussion also returns with some added illumination to the problem of the relation of state and society. The problem of the relation of individuals to associations—sometimes posed as the relation of the individual to society—is a meaningless one. We might as well make a problem out of the relation of the letters of an alphabet to the alphabet. An alphabet is letters, and “society” is individuals in their connections with one another. The mode of combination of letters with one another is obviously a matter of importance; letters form words and sentences when combined, and have no point nor sense except in some combination. I would not say that the latter statement applies literally to individuals, but it cannot be gainsaid that singular human beings exist and behave in constant and varied association with one another. These modes of conjoint action and their consequences profoundly affect not only the outer habits of singular persons, but their dispositions in emotion, desire, planning and valuing.
“Society,” however, is either an abstract or a collective noun. In the concrete, there are societies, associations, groups of an immense number of kinds, having different ties and instituting different interests. They may be gangs, criminal bands; clubs for sport, sociability and eating; scientific and professional organizations; political parties and unions within them; families; religious denominations, business partnerships and corporations; and so on in an endless list. The associations may be local, nationwide and trans-national. Since there is no one thing which may be called society, except their indefinite overlapping, there is no unqualified eulogistic connotation adhering to the term “society.” Some societies are in the main to be approved; some to be condemned, on account of their consequences upon the character and conduct of those engaged in them and because of their remoter consequences upon others. All of them, like all things human, are mixed in quality; “society” is something to be approached and judged critically and discriminatingly. “Socialization” of some sort—that is, the reflex modification of wants, beliefs and work because of share in a united action—is inevitable. But it is as marked in the formation of frivolous, dissipated, fanatical, narrow-minded and criminal persons as in that of competent inquirers, learned scholars, creative artists and good neighbors.
Confining our notice to the results which are desirable, it appears that there is no reason for assigning all the values which are generated and maintained by means of human associations to the work of states. Yet the same unbridled generalizing and fixating tendency of the mind which leads to a monistic fixation of society has extended beyond the hypostatizing of “society” and produced a magnified idealization of The State. All values which result from any kind of association are habitually imputed by one school of social philosophers to the state. Naturally the result is to place the state beyond criticism. Revolt against the state is then thought to be the one unforgivable social sin. Sometimes the deification proceeds from a special need of the time, as in the cases of Spinoza and Hegel. Sometimes it springs from a prior belief in universal will and reason and a consequent need of finding some empirical phenomena which may be identified with the externalization of this absolute spirit. Then this is employed, by circular logic, as evidence for the existence of such a spirit. The net import of our discussion is that a state is a distinctive and secondary form of association, having a specifiable work to do and specified organs of operation.
It is quite true that most states, after they have been brought into being, react upon the primary groupings. When a state is a good state, when the officers of the public genuinely serve the public interests, this reflex effect is of great importance. It renders the desirable associations solider and more coherent; indirectly it clarifies their aims and purges their activities. It places a discount upon injurious groupings and renders their tenure of life precarious. In performing these services, it gives the individual members of valued associations greater liberty and security: it relieves them of hampering conditions which if they had to cope with personally would absorb their energies in mere negative struggle against evils. It enables individual members to count with reasonable certainty upon what others will do, and thus facilitates mutually helpful coöperations. It creates respect for others and for one’s self. A measure of the goodness of a state is the degree in which it relieves individuals from the waste of negative struggle and needless conflict and confers upon him positive assurance and reënforcement in what he undertakes. This is a great service, and there is no call to be niggardly in acknowledging the transformations of group and personal action which states have historically effected.