The problem created in this way is not in its essence a new one. Since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict between the national state and the church—whether conceived as an independent association within the commonwealth or as an international society—has provided some of the most significant passages of political history. The struggle for religious freedom in England (which in the event proved the spring of other liberties) was essentially a struggle to secure the right of voluntary religious associations to determine their own religious life and practices; and while the legal decision in the Scottish Churches’ case was a revival of the Austinian doctrine of state-sovereignty, and an assertion on the part of the state of its own right to sit in judgment upon the religious proceedings of a church, the ensuing situation proved so impossible (as has already been pointed out) that the legal decision had to be annulled by a special piece of legislation. Since that decision most of the “free” churches in England have taken steps to safeguard themselves against similar intrusions on the part of the state. In the present situation, however, such security cannot be absolute since the state still has something to say to the legal instruments under which the churches hold their temporalities. But the entire episode shows how clear is the British sense that the omnicompetency of the state does not extend into the sphere of religious life and practice; and the “Life and Liberty” movement in the Established Church of England is an indication that the control of the state even over a state church is not beyond challenge.
The success with which the independent religious association has established its right to live in the face of the state is probably due to the circumstance that the region in which it claimed freedom was strictly defined; and it may be argued that the state has been on the whole more successful in resisting the claims of the church as an international society because those claims were allowed to enter regions in which the church’s competency could be reasonably denied. The case of Lamennais’ illustrates the point. Lamennais began life as a fervent monarchist and Catholic. He held strongly to the doctrine of the “two societies,” the temporal and the spiritual of which the King and the Pope respectively were the heads.[[39]] These two societies were distinct and within their own sphere, independent of each other. But when the monarchy encroached upon the freedom of the spiritual society, Lamennais broke with it, and when later the papacy insisted upon a withdrawal of his opinion that it had no rights outside the spiritual sphere, he broke with the papacy also. He acknowledged the existence of a borderland in which the interests of both were commingled—“that undiscovered country,” as Lord Acton has put it, “where church and state are parted”; but the broad configurations of the frontier were plain enough. For the most part the relations of church and state as institutional authorities have consisted of assaults and intrigues and forays in this “no man’s land”; and it has not been historically to the advantage of either. And the whole history of this conflict in France and out of it points to the moral that without some clear definition of function, the relation of the state to other associations within and without itself must be one of continual conflict—that is to say, of course, so long as the state and the other associations speak in terms of right and authority. Granted a measure of good-will, the task of delimiting frontiers should not be insuperable; but if a church or a labour union insists on its rights while the state insists upon its authority, the natural result will be confusion.
[39]. “Toute declaration qui supposerait de mon part, meme implicitement, l’abandon de la doctrine traditionelle de deux societés distinctes, independante chacune dans son ordre, serait non pas un acte de vertu, mais un acte coupable. La conscience ne le permet pas—.” This was Lamennais’ reply to a papal demand for retractation in 1833. See Boutard, Lamennais II., 387.
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.
IV
In democratic communities the sovereignty of the state is a residuum left over from the period of dynastic government; and though the divine right of kings is obsolete, we have not yet out-grown the derivative dogma of the divine right of governments. There still gathers around the state an odour of sanctity; and in minds that have a turn for abstraction it is apt to take shape as a sacrosanct objective reality. But soon or late the democratic peoples will have to look upon the state with a cold and business-like realism if they are to be delivered from the dangers that lurk in all quasi-religious and sentimental abasement to conventional idols. It is just this vague political devoutness that makes it easy for the common people to be stampeded into invidious commercial and military enterprises by statesmen schooled in a tradition either frankly dynastic or still deriving its main presuppositions from the dynastic period. There is no security for democracy except in a persistent posture of criticism towards its institutions; and there is no immediate hope of a sane restoration of our somewhat shattered fortunes except as we strip the halo away from the state and discuss it dispassionately in terms of its functions.
Its police responsibilities remain with it as a matter of course, so long as human nature needs policing; and it must provisionally remain the organ of the community in its intercourse across its frontiers. With this latter we are not for the moment concerned; what falls to be considered is the problem of the state’s function in respect of, first, the present tendency to form extraneous and independent (and on occasion conceivably hostile and intractable) centres of authority, and second, the recent process of investing the state with a sort of proprietorship and pastorate at large. Summarily it may be said that the office of the state in respect of these two developments is that it should be on the one hand the clearing house of the increasing functional and professional associations among which its ancient sovereignty is being distributed, and on the other, the trustee of the public in the matter of producing and distributing the goods that are essential to life. The state of the case and the course of events indicate a doctrine of public ownership with democratic functional control, with the necessary machinery for the due co-ordination of the centres of control.
It seems a fairly safe risk to say that the movement toward the public ownership of a certain range of utilities will suffer no abatement with the passing of time. That the means of communication should be public property should be as axiomatic as that a man’s nervous system should belong to himself; and no serious question can be raised as to the certainty of ultimate common proprietorship in this region. With respect to the means of production the case is less clear; but it is a fair assumption, that if a reasonable security of the maintenance of life and health is to be achieved, there must be an increasing public ownership of the sources of raw material and of the means of production so far as the essential commodities are concerned. That there is a range of industrial production beyond this limit which is quite legitimate but which is nevertheless not a matter of universal concern is obvious; and it seems very questionable whether it is the business of the state to do more than to secure that the conditions under which these industries are conducted are of a piece with those obtaining in the primary industries. Objects of differential and selective interest do not appear to enter into the province of the state; it has to do only with those for which the demand is universal because they correspond to a general need. It is a question (as has been previously suggested) whether in this region of production it should not be the general rule that every member of the community should share; in which case there would be ample time and occasion for the production of the secondary and more selective goods for life. There is nothing in this argument which should be construed into a suggestion that the things called in this connection secondary are unimportant. On the contrary they are very important; and with the cultural development of society their importance is likely to grow. The production of books and objects of æsthetic interest is likely to be stimulated very materially by any advance in the right sort of education. But (with the exception of a very narrow margin) these are probably things which are not suitably and fruitfully produced except as they are free from central regulation.