The State is the only complete form in which human society exists, and there are a multitude of phenomena which will be found only as manifestations of human life in the form of a society united by the political bond into a State. The products of such society are law, literature, art, and science, and it has yet to be shown that apart from that form of society known as the State, the family or education or development of character is possible. The State, in short, is an organism or living thing which can be wounded and can be killed, and like every other living thing requires protection against wounding and destruction. … Conscience and morals are products of social and not of individual life, and to say that the sole purpose of the State is to make possible a decent livelihood is as though a man should say that the sole object of human life is to satisfy the interests of existence. A man cannot live any kind of life without food, clothing, and shelter, but that condition does not abolish or diminish the value of the life industrial, the life intellectual, or the life artistic. The State is the condition of all these lives, and its purpose is to sustain them. That is why the State must defend itself. In the ideal, the State represents and embodies the whole people’s conception of what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what is right, and it is the sublime quality of human nature that every great nation has produced citizens ready to sacrifice themselves rather than submit to an external force attempting to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is right.
One is, of course, surprised to see the foregoing in the London Morning Post; the concluding phrase would justify the present agitation in India or in Egypt or Ireland against British rule. What is that agitation but an attempt on the part of the peoples of those provinces to resist “an external force attempting to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is right”? Fortunately, however, for British Imperialism, a people’s conception of “what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what is right,” and their maintenance of that conception, need not necessarily have anything whatever to do with the particular administrative conditions under which they may live—the only thing that a conception of a “State” predicates. The fallacy which runs through the whole passage just quoted, and which makes it, in fact, nonsense, is the same fallacy which dominates the quotation that I have made from Professor Spenser Wilkinson’s book, Britain at Bay—namely, the approximation of a State to a person, the assumption that the political delimitation coincides with the economic and moral delimitation, that in short a State is the embodiment of “the whole people’s conception of what is true, etc.” A State is nothing of the sort. Take the British Empire. This State embodies not a homogeneous conception, but a series of often absolutely contradictory conceptions of “what is true, etc.”; it embodies the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Copt, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Pagan conceptions of right and truth. The fact which vitiates the whole of this conception of a State is that the frontiers which define the State do not coincide with the conception of any of those things which the London Morning Post critic has enumerated; there is no such thing as British morality as opposed to French or German morality, or art or industry. One may, indeed, talk of an English conception of life, because that is a conception of life peculiar to England, but it would be opposed to the conception of life in other parts of the same State, in Ireland, in Scotland, in India, in Egypt, in Jamaica. And what is true of England is true of all the great modern States. Every one of them includes conceptions absolutely opposed to other conceptions in the same State, but many of them absolutely agree with conceptions in foreign States. The British State includes, in Ireland, a Catholic conception in cordial agreement with the Catholic conception in Italy, but in cordial disagreement with the Protestant conception in Scotland, or the Mohammedan conception in Bengal. The real divisions of all those ideals, which the critic enumerates, cut right across State divisions, disregarding them entirely. Yet, again, it is only the State divisions which military conflict has in view.
What was one of the reasons leading to the cessation of religious wars between States? It was that religious conceptions cut across the State frontiers, so that the State ceased to coincide with the religious divisions of Europe, and a condition of things was brought about in which a Protestant Sweden was allied with a Catholic France. This rendered the conflict absurd, and religious wars became an anachronism.
Is not precisely the same thing taking place with reference to the conflicting conceptions of life which now separate men in Christendom? Have not we in America the same doctrinal struggle which is going on in France and Germany and Great Britain? To take one instance—social conflict. On the one side in each case are all the interests bound up with order, authority, individual freedom, without reference to the comfort of the weak, and on the other the reconstruction of human society along hitherto untried lines. These problems are for most men probably—are certainly coming to be, if they are not now—much more profound and fundamental than any conception which coincides with or can be identified with State divisions. Indeed, what are the conceptions of which the divisions coincide with the political frontiers of the British Empire, in view of the fact that that Empire includes nearly every
