113. Looking back on the political theories which we have discussed,
we may see that they all start with putting the question to be dealt
with in the same way, and that their errors are very much due to the
way in which they put it. They make no inquiry into the development
of society and of man through society. They take no account of
other forms of community than that regulated by a supreme coercive
power, either in the way of investigating their historical origin
and connection, or of considering the ideas and states of mind which
they imply or which render them possible. They leave out of sight the
process by which men have been clothed with rights and duties, and
with senses of right and duty, which are neither natural nor derived
from a sovereign power. They look only to the supreme coercive power
on the one side and to individuals, to whom natural rights are
ascribed, on the other, and ask what is the nature and origin of
the right of that supreme coercive power as against these natural
rights of individuals. The question so put can only be answered by
some device for representing the individuals governed as consenting
parties to the exercise of government over them. This they no doubt
are so long as the government is exercised in a way corresponding to
their several wishes; but, so long as this is the case, there is no
interference with their 'natural liberty' to do as they like. It is
only when this liberty is interfered with, that any occasion arises
for an explanation of the compatibility of the sovereign's right with
the natural right of the individual; and it is just then that the
explanation by the supposition that the right of the sovereign is
founded on consent, fails. But the need of the fictitious explanation
arises from a wrong way of putting the question; the power which
regulates our conduct in political society is conceived in too
abstract a way on the one side, and on the other are set over against
it, as the subjects which it controls, individuals invested with all
the moral attributes and rights of humanity. But in truth it is only
as members of a society, as recognising common interests and objects,
that individuals come to have these attributes and rights; and the
power, which in a political society they have to obey, is derived
from the development and systematisation of those institutions for
the regulation of a common life without which they would have no
rights at all.
114. To ask why I am to submit to the power of the state, is to
ask why I am to allow my life to be regulated by that complex of
institutions without which I literally should not have a life to
call my own, nor should be able to ask for a justification of what
I am called on to do. For that I may have a life which I can call
my own, I must not only be conscious of myself and of ends which I
present to myself as mine; I must be able to reckon on a certain
freedom of action and acquisition for the attainment of those ends,
and this can only be secured through common recognition of this
freedom on the part of each other by members of a society, as being
for a common good. Without this, the very consciousness of having
ends of his own and a life which he can direct in a certain way, a
life of which he can make something, would remain dormant in a man.
It is true that slaves have been found to have this consciousness
in high development; but a slave even at his lowest has been partly
made what he is by an ancestral life which was not one of slavery
pure and simple, a life in which certain elementary rights were
secured to the members of a society through their recognition of a
common interest. He retains certain spiritual aptitudes from that
state of family or tribal freedom. This, perhaps, is all that could
be said of most of the slaves on plantations in modern times; but
the slavery of the ancient world, being mainly founded on captivity
in war, was compatible with a considerable amount of civilisation
on the part of the slaves at the time when their slavery began. A
Jewish slave, e.g., would carry with him into slavery a thoroughly
developed conception of right and law. Slavery, moreover, implies the
establishment of some regular system of rights in the slave-owning
society. The slave, especially the domestic slave, has the signs
and effects of this system all about him. Hence such elementary
consciousness of rights--of powers that are his own to make the best
of--as the born slave may inherit from an ancestral life of freedom,
finds a stimulus to its inward development, though no opportunity
for outward exercise, in the habits and ideas of civilised life with
which a common language enables the slave to become conversant, and
which, through the sympathy implied in a common language, he to some
extent makes his own. Thus the appearance in slaves of the conception
that they should be masters of themselves, does not conflict with
the proposition that only so far as a certain freedom of action and
acquisition is secured to a body of men through their recognition of
the exercise of that freedom by each other as being for the common
good, is there an actualisation of the individual's consciousness
of having life and ends of his own. The exercise, manifestation,
expression of this consciousness through a freedom secured in the way
described is necessary to its real existence, just as language of
some sort is necessary to the real existence of thought, and bodily
movement to that of the soul.
115. The demand, again, for a justification of what one is called on
by authority to do presupposes some standard of right, recognised
as equally valid for and by the person making the demand and others
who form a society with him, and such a recognised standard in turn
implies institutions for the regulation of men's dealings with each
other, institutions of which the relation to the consciousness of
right may be compared, as above, to that of language to thought.
It cannot be said that the most elementary consciousness of right
is prior to them, or they to it. They are the expressions in which
it becomes real. As conflicting with the momentary inclinations
of the individual, these institutions are a power which he obeys
unwillingly; which he has to, or is made to, obey. But it is only
through them that the consciousness takes shape and form which
expresses itself in the question, 'Why should I thus be constrained?
By what right is my natural right to do as I like overborne?'
116. The doctrine that the rights of government are founded on the
consent of the governed is a confused way of stating the truth,
that the institutions by which man is moralised, by which he comes
to do what he sees that he must, as distinct from what he would
like, express a conception of a common good; that through them that
conception takes form and reality; and that it is in turn through its
presence in the individual that they have a constraining power over
him, a power which is not that of mere fear, still less a physical
compulsion, but which leads him to do what he is not inclined to
because there is a law that he should.
Rousseau, it will be remembered, speaks of the 'social pact' not
merely as the foundation of sovereignty or civil government, but as
the foundation of morality. Through it man becomes a moral agent; for
the slavery to appetite he substitutes the freedom of subjection to a
self-imposed law. If he had seen at the same time that rights do not
begin till duties begin, and that if there was no morality prior to
the pact there could not be rights, he might have been saved from the
error which the notion of there being natural rights introduces into
his theory. But though he does not seem himself to have been aware
of the full bearing of his own conception, the conception itself
is essentially true. Setting aside the fictitious representation
of an original covenant as having given birth to that common 'ego'
or general will, without which no such covenant would have been
possible, and of obligations arising out of it, as out of a bargain
made between one man and another, it remains true that only through
a recognition by certain men of a common interest, and through the
expression of that recognition in certain regulations of their
dealings with each other, could morality originate, or any meaning be
gained for such terms as 'ought' and 'right' and their equivalents.
117. Morality, in the first instance, is the observance of such
regulations, and though a higher morality, the morality of the
character governed by 'disinterested motives,' i.e. by interest
in some form of human perfection, comes to differentiate itself
from this primitive morality consisting in the observance of rules
established for a common good, yet this outward morality is the
presupposition of the higher morality. Morality and political
subjection thus have a common source, '_political_ subjection'
being distinguished from that of a slave, as a subjection which
secures rights to the subject. That common source is the rational
recognition by certain human beings--it may be merely by children of
the same parent--of a common well-being which is their well-being,
and which they conceive as their well-being whether at any moment
any one of them is inclined to it or no, and the embodiment of that
recognition in rules by which the inclinations of the individuals are
restrained, and a corresponding freedom of action for the attainment
of well-being on the whole is secured.
118. From this common source morality and political subjection in
all its forms always retain two elements in common, one consisting
in antagonism to some inclination, the other consisting in the
consciousness that the antagonism to inclination is founded on reason
or on the conception of some adequate good. It is the antagonism
to inclination involved in the moral life, as alone we know it,
that makes it proper to speak analogically of moral 'laws' and
'imperatives.' It must be remembered, however, that such language
_is_ analogical, and that there is an essential difference between
laws in the strictest sense (laws which are indeed not adequately
described as general commands of a political superior, sanctioned
by liability to pains which that superior can inflict, but in which
a command so sanctioned is an essential element), and the laws of
conscience, of which it is the peculiar dignity that they have no
external imponent and no sanction consisting in fear of bodily evil.
The relation of constraint, in the one case between the man and the
externally imposed law, in the other between some particular desire
of the man and his consciousness of something absolutely desirable,
we naturally represent in English, when we reflect on it, by the
common term 'must.' 'I _must_ connect with the main drainage,' says
the householder to himself, reflecting on an edict of the Local
Board. 'I _must_ try to get A.B. to leave off drinking,' he says to
himself, reflecting on a troublesome moral duty of benevolence to his
neighbour. And if the 'must' in the former case represents in part
the knowledge that compulsion may be put on the man who neglects to
do what he must, which is no part of its meaning in the second, on
the other hand the consciousness that the constraint is for a common
good, which wholly constitutes the power over inclination in the
second case, must always be an element in that obedience which is
properly called obedience to law, or civil or political obedience.
Simple fear can never constitute such obedience. To represent it as
the basis of civil subjection is to confound the citizen with the
slave, and to represent the motive which is needed for the restraint
of those in whom the civil sense is lacking, and for the occasional
reinforcements of the law-abiding principle in others, as if it were
the normal influence in habits of life of which the essential value
lies in their being independent of it. How far in any particular act
of conformity to law the fear of penalties may be operative, it is
impossible to say. What is certain is, that a habit of subjection
founded upon such fear could not be a basis of political or free
society; for to this it is necessary, not indeed that everyone
subject to the laws should take part in voting them, still less
that he should consent to their application to himself, but that it
should represent an idea of common good, which each member of the
society can make his own so far as he is rational, i.e. capable of
the conception of a common good, however much particular passions
may lead him to ignore it and thus necessitate the use of force
to prevent him from doing that which, so far as influenced by the
conception of a common good, he would willingly abstain from.
119. Whether the legislative and administrative agencies of society
can be kept in the main free from bias by private interests, and
true to the idea of common good, without popular control; whether
again, if they can, that 'civil sense,' that appreciation of common
good on the part of the subjects, which is as necessary to a free or
political society as the direction of law to the maintenance of a
common good, can be kept alive without active participation of the
people in legislative functions; these are questions of circumstances
which perhaps do not admit of unqualified answers. The views of those
who looked mainly to the highest development of political life in a
single small society, have to be modified if the object sought for
is the extension of political life to the largest number of people.
The size of modern states renders necessary the substitution of a
representative system for one in which the citizens shared directly
in legislation, and this so far tends to weaken the active interest
of the citizens in the common weal, though the evil may partly be
counteracted by giving increased importance to municipal or communal
administration. In some states, from the want of homogeneity or
facilities of communication, a representative legislature is
scarcely possible. In others, where it exists, a great amount of
power, virtually exempt from popular control, has to be left with
what Rousseau would have called the 'prince or magistrate.' In all
this there is a lowering of civil vitality as compared with that of
the ancient, and perhaps of some exceptionally developed modern,
commonwealths. But perhaps this is a temporary loss that we have to
bear as the price of having recognised the claim to citizenship as
the claim of all men. Certainly all political ideals, which require
active and direct participation by the citizens in the functions of
the sovereign state, fail us as soon as we try to conceive their
realisation on the wide area even of civilised mankind. It is easy
to conceive a better system than that of the great states of modern
Europe, with their national jealousies, rival armies, and hostile
tariffs; but the condition of any better state of things would seem
to be the recognition of some single constraining power, which would
be even more remote from the active co-operation of the individual
citizen than is the sovereign power of the great states at present.
120. These considerations may remind us how far removed from any
foundation in their own will the requirements of the modern state
must seem to be to most of those who have to submit to them. It is
true that the necessity which the state lays upon the individual
is for the most part one to which he is so accustomed that he no
longer kicks against it; but what is it, we may ask, but an external
necessity, which he no more lays on himself than he does the weight
of the atmosphere or the pressure of summer heat and winter frosts,
that compels the ordinary citizen to pay rates and taxes, to serve
in the army, to abstain from walking over the squire's fields,
snaring his hares, or fishing in preserved streams, to pay rent,
to respect those artificial rights of property which only the
possessors of them have any obvious interest in maintaining, or
even (if he is one of the 'proletariate') to keep his hands off the
superfluous wealth of his neighbour, when he has none of his own
to lose? Granted that there are good reasons of social expediency
for maintaining institutions which thus compel the individual to
actions and forbearances that are none of his willing, is it not
abusing words to speak of them as founded on a conception of general
good? A conception does not float in the air. It must be somebody's
conception. Whose conception, then, of general good is it that these
institutions represent? Not that of most of the people who conform
to them, for they do so because they are made to, or have come to
do so habitually from having been long made to; (i.e. from being
frightened at the consequences of not conforming, not consequences
which follow from not conforming in the ordinary course of nature,
but consequences which the state inflicts, artificial consequences.)
But when a man is said to obey an authority from interest in a common
good, some other good is meant than that which consists in escaping
the punishment which the authority would inflict on disobedience. Is
then the conception of common good which is alleged a conception of
it on the part of those who founded or who maintain the institutions
in question? But is it not certain that private interests have been
the main agents in establishing, and are still in maintaining, at any
rate all the more artificial rights of property? Have not our modern
states, again, in nearly every case been founded on conquest, and are
not the actual institutions of government in great measure the direct
result of such conquest, or, where revolutions have intervened, of
violence which has been as little governed by any conception of
general good? Supposing that philosophers can find exquisite reasons
for considering the institutions and requirements which have resulted
from all this self-seeking and violence to be contributory to the
common good of those who have to submit to them, is it not trifling
to speak of them as founded on or representing a conception of this
good, when no such conception has influenced those who established,
maintain, or submit to them? And is it not seriously misleading, when
the requirements of the state have so largely arisen out of force
directed by selfish motives, and when the motive to obedience to
those requirements is determined by fear, to speak of them as having
a common source with the morality of which it is admitted that the
essence is to be disinterested and spontaneous?
121. If we would meet these objections fairly, certain admissions
must be made. The idea of a common good which the state fulfils has
never been the sole influence actuating those who have been agents in
the historical process by which states have come to be formed; and
even so far as it has actuated them, it has been only as conceived
in some very imperfect form that it has done so. This is equally
true of those who contribute to the formation and maintenance of
states rather as agents, and of those who do so rather as patients.
No one could pretend that even the most thoughtful and dispassionate
publicist is capable of the idea of the good served by the state to
which he belongs, in all its fulness. He apprehends it only in some
of its bearings; but it is as a common good that he apprehends it,
i.e. not as a good for himself or for this man or that more than
another, but for all members equally in virtue of their relation
to each other and their common nature. The idea which the ordinary
citizen has of the common good served by the state is much more
limited in content. Very likely he does not think of it at all in
connection with anything that the term 'state' represents to him.
But he has a clear understanding of certain interests and rights
common to himself with his neighbours, if only such as consist in
getting his wages paid at the end of the week, in getting his money's
worth at the shop, in the inviolability of his own person and that
of his wife. Habitually and instinctively, i.e. without asking the
reason why, he regards the claim which in these respects he makes
for himself as conditional upon his recognising a like claim in
others, and thus as in the proper sense a right,--a claim of which
the essence lies in its being common to himself with others. Without
this instinctive recognition he is one of the 'dangerous classes,'
virtually outlawed by himself. With it, though he have no reverence
for the 'state' under that name, no sense of an interest shared with
others in maintaining it, he has the needful elementary conception of
a common good maintained by law. It is the fault of the state if this
conception fails to make him a loyal subject, if not an intelligent
patriot. It is a sign that the state is not a true state; that it is
not fulfilling its primary function of maintaining law equally in
the interest of all, but is being administered in the interest of
classes; whence it follows that the obedience which, if not rendered
willingly, the state compels the citizen to render, is not one that
he feels any spontaneous interest in rendering, because it does not
present itself to him as the condition of the maintenance of those
rights and interests, common to himself with his neighbours, which he
understands.
122. But if the law which regulates private relations and its
administration are so equally applied to all, that all who are
capable of a common interest are prompted by that interest to conform
to the law, the result is still only the loyal subject as distinct
from the intelligent patriot, i.e. as distinct from the man who so
appreciates the good which in common with others he derives from the
state--from the nation organised in the form of a self-governing
community to which he belongs--as to have a passion for serving
it, whether in the way of defending it from external attack, or
developing it from within. The citizens of the Roman empire were
loyal subjects; the admirable maintenance of private rights made them
that; but they were not intelligent patriots, and chiefly because
they were not, the empire fell. That active interest in the service
of the state, which makes patriotism in the better sense, can hardly
arise while the individual's relation to the state is that of a
passive recipient of protection in the exercise of his rights of
person and property. While this is the case, he will give the state
no thanks for the protection which he will come to take as a matter
of course, and will only be conscious of it when it descends upon him
with some unusual demand for service or payment, and then he will be
conscious of it in the way of resentment. If he is to have a higher
feeling of political duty, he must take part in the work of the
state. He must have a share, direct or indirect, by himself acting
as a member or by voting for the members of supreme or provincial
assemblies, in making and maintaining the laws which he obeys. Only
thus will he learn to regard the work of the state as a whole, and
to transfer to the whole the interest which otherwise his particular
experience would lead him to feel only in that part of its work that
goes to the maintenance of his own and his neighbour's rights.
123. Even then his patriotism will hardly be the passion which it
needs to be, unless his judgment of what he owes to the state is
quickened by a feeling of which the 'patria,' the fatherland, the
seat of one's home, is the natural object; and of this feeling
the state becomes the object only so far as it is an organisation
of a people to whom the individual feels himself bound by ties
analogous to those which bind him to his family, ties derived from a
common dwelling-place with its associations, from common memories,
traditions and customs, and from the common ways of feeling and
thinking which a common language and still more a common literature
embodies. Such an organisation of an homogeneous people the modern
state in most cases is (the two Austrian states being the most
conspicuous exceptions), and such the Roman state emphatically was
not.
124. But, it will be said, we are here again falling back on our
unproved assumption that the state is an institution for the
promotion of a common good. This granted, it is not difficult to
make out that in most men at any rate there is a sufficient interest
in some form of social well-being, sufficient understanding of the
community between their own well-being and that of their neighbours,
to make them loyal to such an institution. But the question is,
whether the promotion of a common good, at any rate in any sense
appreciable by the multitude, is any necessary characteristic of a
state. It is admitted that the outward visible sign of a state is
the presence of a supreme or independent coercive power, to which,
habitual obedience is rendered by a certain multitude of people,
and that this power may often be exercised in a manner apparently
detrimental to the general well-being. It may be the case, as we
have tried to show that it is, that a power which is in the main so
exercised, and is generally felt to be so, is not likely long to
maintain its supremacy; but this does not show that a state cannot
exist without the promotion of the common good of its subjects, or
that (in any intelligible way) the promotion of such good belongs
to the idea of a state. A short-lived state is not therefore not a
state, and if it were, it is rather the active interference with the
subject's well-being, than a failure to promote it, that is fatal
to the long life of a state. How, finally, can the state be said to
exist for the sake of an end, or to fulfil an idea, the contemplation
of which, it is admitted, has had little to do with the actions which
have had most to do with bringing states into existence?
125. The last question is a crucial one, which must be met at
the outset. It must be noticed that the ordinary conception of
organisation, as we apply it in the interpretation of nature, implies
that agents may be instrumental in the attainment of an end or the
fulfilment of an idea of which there is no consciousness on the
part of the organic agents themselves. If it is true on the one
hand that the interpretation of nature by the supposition of ends
external to it, with reference to which its processes are directed,
has been discarded, and that its rejection has been the condition
of growth in an exact knowledge of nature, on the other hand the
recognition of ends immanent in nature, of ideas realised within it,
is the basis of a scientific explanation of life. The phaenomena
of life are not ideal, in the sense in which the ideal is opposed
to that which is sensibly verifiable, but they are related to the
processes of material change which are their conditions, as ideas
or ideal ends which those processes contribute to realise, because,
while they determine the processes (while the processes would not
be what they are but for relation to them), yet they are not those
processes, not identical with any one or number of them, or all of
them together. Life does not reside in any of the organs of life,
or in any or all of the processes of material change through which
these pass. Analyse or combine these as you will, you do not detect
it as the result of the analysis or combination. It is a function or
end which they realise according to a plan or idea which determines
their existence before they exist and survives their disappearance.
If it were held, then, that the state were an organised community
in the same sense in which a living body is, of which the members
at once contribute to the function called life, and are made what
they are by that function, according to an idea of which there is no
consciousness on their part, we should only be following the analogy
of the established method of interpreting nature.
126. The objection to such a view would be that it represents the
state as a purely natural, not at all as a moral, organism. Moral
agency is not merely an agency by which an end is attained, or an
idea realised, or a function fulfilled, but an agency determined by
an idea on the part of the agent, by his conception of an end or
function; and the state would be brought into being and sustained
by merely natural, as opposed to moral, agency, unless there were
a consciousness of ends--and of ends the same in principle with
that served by the state itself--on the part of those by whom it is
brought into being, and sustained. I say 'ends the same in principle
with that served by the state itself,' because, if the state arose
out of the action of men determined, indeed, by the consciousness of
ends, but ends wholly heterogeneous to that realised by the state,
it would not be a moral institution, would not stand in any moral
relation to men. Now among the influences that have operated in the
formation of states, a large part, it must be admitted, are simply
natural. Such are the influences of climate, of distribution of
mountain and plain, land and water, &c, of all physical demarcations
and means of communication. But these, it is clear, are only organic
to the formation of states so far as, so to speak, they take a
character, which does not belong to them as merely natural, from
agencies distinctively human.
127. 'Human, if you like,' it may be replied, 'but not moral, if a
moral agency implies any reference to a social or human good, to a
good which the individual desires because it is good for others, or
for mankind, as well as himself. In the earth--hunger of conquering
hordes, in the passions of military despots, in the pride or avarice
or vindictiveness which moved such men as Louis XI or Henry VIII to
override the semi-anarchy of feudalism with a real sovereignty, what
is there of reference to such good? Yet if we suppose the influence
of such motives as these, together with the natural influences just
spoken of, to be erased from the history of the formation of states,
its distinguishing features are gone.'
128. The selfish motives described must not, any more than the
natural influences, be regarded in abstraction, if we would
understand their true place in the formation of states. The pure
desire for social good does not indeed operate in human affairs
unalloyed by egotistic motives, but on the other hand what we call
egotistic motives do not act without direction from an involuntary
reference to social good,--'involuntary' in the sense that it is so
much a matter of course that the individual does not distinguish it
from his ordinary state of mind. The most conspicuous modern instance
of a man who was instrumental in working great and in some ways
beneficial changes in the political order of Europe, from what we
should be apt to call the most purely selfish motives, is Napoleon.
Without pretending to analyse these motives precisely, we may say
that a leading one was the passion for glory; but if there is to
be truth in the statement that this passion governed Napoleon, it
must be qualified by the farther statement that the passion was
itself governed by social influences, operative on him, from which
it derived its particular direction. With all his egotism, his
individuality was so far governed by the action of the national
spirit in and upon him, that he could only glorify himself in the
greatness of France; and though the national spirit expressed itself
in an effort after greatness which was in many ways of a mischievous
and delusive kind, yet it again had so much of what may be called the
spirit of humanity in it, that it required satisfaction in the belief
that it was serving mankind. Hence the aggrandisement of France, in
which Napoleon's passion for glory satisfied itself, had to take at
least the semblance of a deliverance of oppressed peoples, and in
taking the semblance it to a great extent performed the reality; at
any rate in western Germany and northern Italy, wherever the Code
Napoléon was introduced.
129. It is thus that actions of men, whom in themselves we reckon
bad, are 'overruled' for good. There is nothing mysterious or
unintelligible in such 'overruling.' There is nothing in the effect
which we ascribe to the 'overruling,' any more than in any effect
belonging to the ordinary course of nature, which there was not
in the cause as it really was and as we should see it to be if we
fully understood it. The appearance to the contrary arises from our
taking too partial and abstract a view of the cause. We look at the
action e.g. of Napoleon with reference merely to the selfishness
of his motives. We forget how far his motives, in respect of their
concrete reality, in respect of the actual nature of the ends
pursued as distinct from the particular relation in which those
ends stood to his personality, were made for him by influences with
which his selfishness had nothing to do. It was not his selfishness
that made France a nation, or presented to him continuously an end
consisting in the national aggrandisement of France, or at particular
periods such ends as the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, the
establishment of a centralised political order in France on the
basis of social equality, the promulgation of the civil code, the
maintenance of the French system along the Rhine. His selfishness
gave a particular character to his pursuit of these ends, and (so far
as it did so) did so for evil. Finally it led him into a train of
action altogether mischievous. But at each stage of his career, if
we would understand what his particular agency really was, we must
take account of his ends in their full character, as determined by
influences with, which, his passion for glory no doubt co-operated,
but which, did not originate with it or with him, and in some measure
represented the struggle of mankind towards perfection.
130. And not only must we thus correct our too abstract views of the
particular agency of such a man as Napoleon. If we would understand
the apparent results of his action, we must bear in mind how much
besides his particular agency has really gone to produce them, so far
as they were good; how much of unnoticed effort on the part of men
obscure because unselfish, how much of silent process in the general
heart of man. Napoleon was called the 'armed soldier of revolution,'
and it was in that character that he rendered what service he did
to men; but the revolution was not the making of him or his likes.
Caesar again we have learnt to regard as a benefactor of mankind, but
it was not Caesar that made the Roman law, through which chiefly or
solely the Roman empire became a blessing. The idiosyncrasy, then,
of the men who have been most conspicuous in the production of great
changes in the condition of mankind, though it has been an essential
element in their production, has been so only so far as it has been
overborne by influences and directed to ends, which were indeed not
external to the men in question--which on the contrary helped to make
them inwardly and spiritually what they really were--but which formed
no part of their distinguishing idiosyncrasy. If that idiosyncrasy
was conspicuously selfish, it was still not through their selfishness
that such men contributed to mould the institutions by which nations
have been civilised and developed, but through their fitness to act
as organs of impulses and ideas which had previously gained a hold on
some society of men, and for the realisation of which the means and
conditions had been preparing quite apart from the action of those
who became the most noticeable instruments of their realisation.
131. The assertion, then, that an idea of social good is represented
by, or realised in, the formation of states, is not to be met by
pointing to the selfishness and bad passions of men who have been
instrumental in forming them, if there is reason to think that the
influences, under the direction of which these passions became thus
instrumental, are due to the action of such an idea. And when we
speak thus we do not refer to any action of the idea otherwise than
in the consciousness of men. It may be legitimate, as we have seen,
to consider ideas as existing and acting otherwise, and perhaps,
on thinking the matter out, we should find ourselves compelled to
regard the idea of social good as a communication to the human
consciousness, a consciousness developing itself in time, from an
eternally complete consciousness. But here we are considering it as
a source of the moral action of men, and therefore necessarily as
having its seat in their consciousness, and the proposition advanced
is that such an idea is a determining element in the consciousness of
the most selfish men who have been instrumental in the formation or
maintenance of states; that only through its influence in directing
and controlling their actions could they be so instrumental; and
that, though its active presence in their consciousness is due to the
institutions, the organisation of life, under which they are born
and bred, the existence of these institutions is in turn due to the
action, under other conditions, of the same idea in the minds of men.
132. It is the necessity of a supreme coercive power to the existence
of a state that gives plausibility to the view that the action of
merely selfish passions may lead to the formation of states. They
have been motive causes, it would seem, in the processes by which
this 'imperium' has been established; as, e.g., the acquisition of
military power by a tribal chieftain, the conquest of one tribe
by another, the supersession of the independent prerogatives of
families by a tyrant which was the antecedent condition of the
formation of states in the ancient world, the supersession of feudal
prerogatives by the royal authority which served the same purpose in
modern Europe. It is not, however, supreme coercive power, simply
as such, but supreme coercive power exercised in a certain way and
for certain ends, that makes a state; viz. exercised according to
law, written or customary, and for the maintenance of rights. The
abstract consideration of sovereignty has led to these qualifications
being overlooked. Sovereignty = supreme coercive power, indeed,
but such power as exercised in and over a state, which means with
the qualifications specified; but the mischief of beginning with
an inquiry into sovereignty before the idea of a state has been
investigated, is that it leads us to adopt this abstract notion of
sovereignty, as merely supreme coercive power, and then, when we
come to think of the state as distinguished by sovereignty, makes
us suppose that supreme coercive power is all that is essential
to a state, forgetting that it is rather the state that makes the
sovereign, than the sovereign that makes the state. Supposing one
man had been master of all the slaves in one of the states of the
American Union, there would have been a multitude of men under one
supreme coercive power, but the slaves and the master would have
formed no state, because there would have been no recognised rights
of slave against slave enforced by the master, nor would dealings
between master and slaves have been regulated by any law. The fact
that sovereign power, as implied in the fact of its supremacy,
can alter any laws, is apt to make us overlook the necessity of
conformity to law on the part of the sovereign, if he is to be the
sovereign of a state. A power that altered laws otherwise than
according to law, according to a constitution, written or unwritten,
would be incompatible with the existence of a state, which is a body
of persons, recognised by each other as having rights, and possessing
certain institutions for the maintenance of those rights. The office
of the sovereign, as an institution of such a society, is to protect
those rights from invasion, either from without, from foreign
nations, or from within, from members of the society who cease to
behave as such. Its supremacy is the society's independence of such
attacks from without or within. It is an agency of the society, or
the society itself acting for this end. If the power, existing for
this end, is used on the whole otherwise than in conformity either
with a formal constitution or with customs which virtually serve the
purpose of a constitution, it is no longer an institution for the
maintenance of rights and ceases to be the agent of a state. We only
count Russia a state by a sort of courtesy on the supposition that
the power of the Czar, though subject to no constitutional control,
is so far exercised in accordance with a recognised tradition of what
the public good requires as to be on the whole a sustainer of rights.
It is true that, just as in a state, all law being derived from the
sovereign, there is a sense in which the sovereign is not bound by
any law, so there is a sense in which all rights are derived from
the sovereign, and no power which the sovereign refuses to allow
can be a right; but it is only in the sense that, the sovereign
being the state acting in a certain capacity, and the state being
an institution for the more complete and harmonious maintenance of
the rights of its members, a power, claimed as a right, but which
the state or sovereign refuses to allow, cannot be really compatible
with the general system of rights. In other words, it is true only
on the supposition that a state is made a state by the functions
which it fulfils of maintaining the rights of its members as a
whole or a system, in such a way that none gains at the expense of
another (no one has any power guaranteed to him through another's
being deprived of that power). Thus the state, or the sovereign as
a characteristic institution of the state, does not create rights,
but gives fuller reality to rights already existing. It secures and
extends the exercise of powers, which men, influenced in dealing with
each other by an idea of common good, had recognised in each other
as being capable of direction to that common good, and had already
in a certain measure secured to each other in consequence of chat
recognition. It is not a state unless it does so.
133. It may be said that this is an arbitrary restriction of the
term 'state.' If any other word, indeed, can be found to express
the same thing, by all means let it be used instead. But some word
is wanted for the purpose, because as a matter of fact societies of
men, already possessing rights, and whose dealings with each other
have been regulated by customs conformable to those rights, but not
existing in the form to which the term 'state' has just been applied
(i.e. not having a systematic law in which the rights recognised are
harmonised, and which is enforced by a power strong enough at once
to protect a society against disturbance within and aggression from
without), have come to take on that form. A word is needed to express
that form of society, both according to the idea of it which has
been operative in the minds of the members of the societies which
have undergone the change described (an idea only gradually taking
shape as the change proceeded), and according to the more explicit
and distinct idea of it which we form in reflecting on the process.
The word 'state' is the one naturally used for the purpose. The exact
degree to which the process must have been carried before the term
'state' can be applied to the people in which it has gone on, cannot
be precisely determined, but as a matter of fact we never apply it
except in cases where it has gone some way, and we are justified in
speaking of the state according to its idea as the society in which
it is completed.
134. It is a mistake then to think of the state as an aggregation
of individuals under a sovereign; equally so whether we suppose the
individuals as such, or apart from what they derive from society, to
possess natural rights, or suppose them to depend on the sovereign
for the possession of rights. A state presupposes other forms of
community, with the rights that arise out of them, and only exists
as sustaining, securing, and completing them. In order to make a
state there must have been families of which the members recognised
rights in each other (recognised in each other powers capable of
direction by reference to a common good); there must further have
been intercourse between families, or between tribes that have grown
out of families, of which each in the same sense recognised rights
in the other. The recognition of a right being very short of its
definition, the admission of a right in each other by two parties,
whether individuals, families, or tribes, being very different from
agreement as to what the right consists in, what it is a right to do
or acquire, the rights recognised need definition and reconciliation
in a general law. When such a general law has been arrived at,
regulating the position of members of a family towards each other
and the dealings of families or tribes with each other; when it is
voluntarily recognised by a community of families or tribes, and
maintained by a power strong enough at once to enforce it within
the community and to defend the integrity of the community against
attacks from without, then the elementary state has been formed.
135. That, however, is the beginning, not the end, of the state.
When once it has come into being, new rights arise in it (1) through
the claim for recognition on the part of families and tribes living
on the same territory with those which in community form the state,
but living at first in some relation of subjection to them. A common
humanity, of which language is the expression, necessarily leads to
the recognition of some good as common to these families with those
which form the state. This is in principle the recognition of rights
on their part; and the consequent embodiment of this recognition in
the laws of the state is their admission as members of it. (Instances
of this process are found in the states of Greece and the early
history of Rome.) (2) The same thing may happen in regard to external
communities ('external' territorially), whether these have been
already formed into states or no. It may happen through the conquest
of one by another, through their submission to a common conqueror,
as under the Roman empire, or through voluntary combination, as
with the Swiss cantons and the United States of America. However
the combination may arise, it results in new rights as between the
combined communities within the system of a single state. (3) The
extended intercourse between individuals, which the formation of the
state renders possible, leads to new complications in their dealings
with each other, and with it to new forms of right, especially in
regard to property; rights as far removed from any obvious foundation
on the _suum cuique_ principle as the right of a college to the great
tithes of a parish for which it does nothing. (4) The administration
of the state gives rise to rights, to the establishment of powers
necessary for its administration. (5) New situations of life may
arise out of the extended dealings of man with man which the state
renders possible (e.g. through the crowding of population in certain
localities) which make new modes of protecting the people a matter
virtually of right. And, as new rights arise in the state once
formed, so further purposes are served. It leads to a development and
moralisation of man beyond the stage which they must have reached
before it could be possible.
136. On this I shall dwell more in my next course of lectures. What
I am now concerned to point out is that, however necessary a factor
force may have been in the process by which states have been formed
and transformed, it has only been such a factor as co-operating with
those ideas without which rights could not exist. I say 'could not
_exist_,' not 'could not be recognised,' because rights are made by
recognition. There is no right 'but thinking makes it so'; none that
is not derived from some idea that men have about each other. Nothing
is more real than a right, yet its existence is purely ideal, if by
'ideal' is meant that which is not dependent on anything material
but has its being solely in consciousness. It is to these ideal
realities that force is subordinate in the creation and development
of states. The force of conquest from without, the force exercised
within communities by such agents as the early Greek tyrants or the
royal suppressors of feudalism in modern Europe, has only contributed
to the formation of states in so far as its effects have taken
a character which did not belong to them as effects of force; a
character due to their operation in a moral world, in which rights
already existed, resting on the recognition by men of each other as
determined, or capable of being determined, by the conception of a
common good. It is not indeed true that only a state can produce a
state, though modern history might seem to favour that notion. As a
matter of fact, the formation of modern states through feudalism out
of an earlier tribal system has been dependent on ideas derived from
the Roman state, if not on institutions actually handed down from it;
and the improvement and development of the state-system which has
taken place since the French Revolution has been through agencies
which all presuppose and are determined by the previous existence
of states. But the Greek states, so far as we know, were a first
institution of the kind, not a result of propagation from previously
existing states. But the action which brought them into being was
only effectual for its purpose, because the idea of right, though
only in the form of family or tribal right, was already in operation.