Chapter I: The Idea of the State in England

Most of our recent political troubles are attributable to what Fortescue in the fifteenth century called "lack of governance." We are all of us painfully aware of the fact; but we are not all of us equally conscious that the feebleness and inefficiency of our supreme administration are to no small extent due to the absence among our people as a whole of any adequate idea of the position and function of the State. For if it is true generally that every nation has the sort of government that it deserves, it is specially true of a nation with democratic institutions. Weaknesses of intellect, infirmities of will, and faults of character in the sovereign representative assembly are but reproductions on a magnified scale of the same defects in the electorate. It is the failure of our people as a whole to realize the idea of the State that has resulted in the filling of the House of Commons with men who stand, not for the Nation in its unity and the Empire in its integrity, but for all sorts of limited and conflicting sectional interests--parties, leagues, fellowships, unions, cliques, schools, churches, orders, classes, trusts, syndicates, and so on. No wonder that in times of national and imperial crisis such representatives prove totally unequal to the duty of strong, corporate, and patriotic administration.

The weakness of the idea of the State among the peoples of the British Isles is explicable on geographical and historical grounds. For the idea of the State--that is to say, the idea of society politically organized as an indivisible unit under a sovereign government--although it has other and deeper sources of vitality, is specially fostered by a sense of national danger, but tends to languish when complete immunity from external peril can be postulated. Never has the realization of "the commonwealth of this realm of England" been so strong as it was in the days when Spanish invasion threatened. The splendid patriotism of that great age is portrayed for all time in the immortal glory of Shakespeare's historical plays. Not far short, however, rose the patriotic realization of national unity during the crisis of the Napoleonic struggle. Wordsworth's magnificent _Sonnets dedicated_ to Liberty remain as the enduring memorial of the heights which British State-consciousness then attained:

In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

But, except at rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as possible be abated, as an intruder into the sphere of private enterprise which should be extruded, as an enemy to liberty which should be suppressed. It may readily be admitted that in days before the State had been democratized this hostile attitude was not without justification. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the State meant the Stuart monarch--_L'État c'est Moi_--and the interests of the Stuart monarch were by no means those of any of the nations that he governed. In the early eighteenth century the State meant the Whig oligarchy, and its members only too easily came to regard the welfare of the Empire as identical with their own prosperity. In the early nineteenth century the State meant the landed and moneyed magnates of the Tory aristocracy, and they had an extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith and the _laissez-faire_ economists, together with that of their contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the nineteenth century school of scientific individualists not only demonstrated (as they did with extraordinary pungency and success) the extreme folly and incompetence of the main government departments of their own day; they also sought to establish the eternal and inevitable antagonism of Man versus the State, and to limit universally the functions of government to the irreducible minimum.

This attitude of hostility, however, ceased to have its old justification with the advent of democracy. The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 have so enlarged the electorate as to convert government into something approaching self-government, and the State has become the organized form of democracy itself. Hence the individualism of Milton, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Spencer is an anachronism. It is not remarkable, then, that, following Parliamentary Reform, the idea of the State revived in Britain with new force and in a new form--no longer stimulated by the pressure of extreme peril, but excited by the new possibilities of corporate democratic activity. The young lions of the Fabian Society in their optimistic infancy were filled with the idea of the State, and advocated State action in wide spheres of industrial organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded State-control and regulation of our world-wide commerce.

But the revival of the idea of the State, under the stimulus of Socialists, Imperialists, Protectionists, and others, was short lived. All these enthusiasts became disappointed and disgusted with democracy and with the State which it controls. Democracy did not move fast enough for them, nor always in the direction that they desired. Hence--and most markedly since the dawn of the twentieth century--a reaction against the State has set in. There has been, as we have already seen, an epidemic of passive resistance. Individualists of all sorts, together with Trade Unionists, Syndicalists, Clericals, Suffragists, No-Conscriptionists, Ulstermen, Nationalists, and other bodies, giving up the attempt to convert democracy and to secure their ends through the sovereign agency of the democratic State, are taking direct action, are proclaiming rival authorities to the State, and are threatening the very existence of the body politic. The outlook is ominous, and it needs to be steadily faced. The present moment, moreover, is peculiarly favourable for its consideration. For the sudden and unexpected return of extreme national danger has once again quickened in our midst the idea of the State, has revived the spirit of patriotism, has restored the national unity, and has reenforced the principle of civic service. We can see under the revealing searchlight of the war the anarchy towards which we have been drifting during the past ten or more years.