Topics for Debate
1. Labor contributes more than management to national prosperity.
2. High prices are an advantage (or a disadvantage) to the workers of the United States.
3. Every earner of income should be required to save a certain portion of his earnings each year, thus making all men capitalists as well as workers.
CHAPTER IV
THE NATURE AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENT
The purpose of this chapter is to explain what government is, how it originated, why people obey it, and what its functions are.
Various uses of the word “state”.
What is the State?—The word “state” is so short and simple that everybody is assumed to know just what it means. And in a general way everyone does know what it means. But it is used in more than one sense and with a good deal of latitude. When we speak, for example, of the “newly-created states of Europe” we mean Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Jugo-Slavia. The term “state”, so used, designates a country with an independent political existence. But we also speak of “the states of the Union”, by which we mean merely the political divisions of a single country. Then, again, one frequently encounters such expressions as “a statesman who served the state” or “state control of railroads”, or “the relations between Church and State”. To what does the term in such cases refer? Here the expression is used in a generic sense to include politically organized society, and those who so use it are thinking more particularly of the political agencies through which organized society acts.
A general definition.
A simple definition will cover all these uses of the term. A state is a body of people, possessing a definite territory, and politically organized. Territory is essential. The Jews for many centuries did not constitute a state because they had no territory of their own. Now they are once more in the way of obtaining a national homeland. Population is also essential. The territory around the South Pole does not form a state because it is uninhabited. And a political organization, a government, is the third essential. The territory which is now the United States did not form a state before the first European settlers reached it, for, although it was inhabited, the savages who roamed over its vast expanses were not politically organized. They had, for the most part, neither government nor laws. Persons, territory, and organization—these are the essential attributes of a state.