The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study. Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set forth the spiritual aims of politics—to preach Righteousness and Mercy as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.' 'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'[61]
It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made politics a branch of separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as compared with other forms of human association, and to have proclaimed, once and for all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in the opening words of his Politics, 'is a community of some kind.' That is to say, States belong to the same genus, as it were, as political parties, trade unions, cricket clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as ours. What, then, is the difference between a State and a political party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some good, the State or political community, which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.'
Why is the State the highest of all forms of association? Why should our citizenship, for instance, take precedence of our trade unionism or our business obligations? Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics I think the reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of these associations could have been formed or be maintained. 'He who first founded the State was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when protected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the resounding Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public power of all societies is above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use of that power is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed which may necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the contrary. Because except our own private and probable resolutions be by the law of public determinations overruled, we take away all possibility of social life in the world.'[62] The Greeks did not deny, as the example of Socrates shows, the right of private judgement on the question of obedience to law, or the duty of respect for what Hooker calls the Law of Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of conscience no human authority can or should prevail. But Aristotle held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and faithful citizenship are themselves matters normally ordained by the law of Reason or of God and that, as against those of any other association (κοινωνία), the claims of the State are paramount. In other words, he would deny what is sometimes loosely called the right of rebellion, whilst not closing the door to that duty of rebellion which has so often advanced the cause of liberty. When Aristotle speaks of the State, moreover, he does not mean a sovereign authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia or Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and Justice according to recognized standards: and he is thinking of Law and Justice, not simply as part of the apparatus of government but as based upon moral principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of men in States and the administration of Justice, which is the determination of what is righteous, is the principle of order in political society.' 'Of Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea of the State as the Organization of Mutual Aid.
The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.
Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone remained upright—the Christian Church with its organization for ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the time when mankind should be united under one government and that government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the Founder of Christianity. The familiar petition in the Lord's Prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven sounded, in the ears of Dante and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and canonists, as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate political unity of mankind on the basis of Christian Law. Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of mediaeval political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in the oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,
'every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that Civitas Dei, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and the earth.[1] ... Thus the Theory of Human Society must accept the divinely created organization of the Universe as a prototype of the first principles which govern the construction of human communities.... Therefore, in all centuries of the Middle Age, Christendom, which in destiny is identical with Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community, founded and governed by God Himself. Mankind is one "mystical body"; it is one single and internally connected "people" or "folk"; it is an all-embracing corporation, which constitutes that Universal Realm, spiritual and temporal, which may be called the Universal Church, or, with equal propriety, the Commonwealth of the Human Race. Therefore, that it may attain its one purpose, it needs One Law and One Government.'[64]
But the mediaeval ideal, like the Greek, broke down in practice. 'Where the Middle Ages failed', says the Master of Balliol, continuing a passage already quoted, 'was in attempting ... to make politics the handmaid of religion, to give the Church the organization and form of a political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling spirit into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other words, the mediaeval attempt broke down through neglecting the special conditions and problems of the political department of life, through declining, as it were, to specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of the Two Swords, whether the Emperor derived his power directly from God or indirectly through the Pope, or whether the sword should be used at all, the actual work of government in laying the foundations of the good life was neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and Order were largely in abeyance and the range of State action which we to-day describe as 'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience which Germany went through under the anarchy of feudalism and petty governments, lasting to well within living memory, which by a natural reaction has led the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.
The study of politics had to become secular before it could once more become practical, and, by being practical, ministering to practical ideals and enlisting practical devotion, become, as it were, sacred once more. Where the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not an aspiration: and those who are concerned with it, whether as rulers or voters, should have studied its problems, reflected on its possibilities and limitations, and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated experience.
Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became secular, the art of government has advanced by giant strides. Invention has followed invention, and experiment experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in the Old World and the New are at hand to watch and to record the latest devices for dealing with a hundred difficult special problems—whether it be the administration of justice or patronage, the organization of political parties, the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the possibilities and limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There has, indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in the last four centuries and particularly in the last century, as in the very kindred art of medicine. The wonderful concentration of energy which the various belligerent powers have been able to throw into the present war is at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this truth. Man's common life in the State is more real, more charged with meaning and responsibility, more potent for good or for ill than it has ever been before—than our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could have dreamed of.