national relations." The " sovereign people believed in all this. Blinded by their patriotism and their ideal of service to the State, they allowed the socialistic militarism of Sparta, the national militarism of Rome, the military imperialism of Cæsar, the military efficiency of Frederick the Great, the political ethics of Machiavelli, and the biological ethics of Nietzsche to be accumulated, consolidated, and organized, and then in a vast crescendo hurled against the wall of liberty, hurled against, and broken to pieces by, those nations of the West that held a Liberal view of life and progress.

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In our own time we have thus seen the general will" of the "sovereign people " led to such enormities by State idolatry. Worship of the State has an unsavoury history. So much wickedness has been performed in the name of the State that we may well distrust a man who proposes that service to such an ideal shall be the basis of his static political construction. Such a man is the German Karl Marx. In his hands the idol is decorated with the trappings of democracy, and idealized by the ethics of social service. None the less we are asked to make the old surrender of our individual life, to immolate ourselves at the ancient altar. Before we bow ourselves down before the German idol of State-Socialism, we shall be wise to ask ourselves who are the

priests that lurk within the recesses of the temple, and what they will do with our obedience when they have obtained it.

Liberalism is bound to oppose all forms of Conservative idolatry, since its concern is the increase of individual liberty. Freedom, to those who worship the State, means nothing but the rights of citizenship, an entire subordination of the part to the interest of the whole. There have been many strange definitions of liberty, even stranger than the crimes that have been committed in its name. The Persians who followed Cyrus the Great thought they saw freedom in his absolute despotism. The Spartans, restrained at every turn, unable to choose their wives or their food, unable to educate their children or even to speak as nature intended them to, considered themselves the most glorious of the products of freedom. The Romans, like the Prussians, marched forward to conquer the world in the firm belief that their militarism was the finest product of civilization, although their religion was unimaginative and their literature unimportant, while we cannot even remember the names of the soldiers who made their empire, so uniform in pattern are they, so devoid of distinctive personality. No trace is to be found among these State-worshippers of the mighty intellectual development of the Athenians, who always

sacrificed the whole to the part, the nation to the town, and the town to the citizen, and who believed in leisure and inefficiency. Freedom of thought and action was the keynote of the Athenian democracy. All its political development only served to intensify individuality at the expense of authority. Only the Athenians were intelligent enough to see that the good of the body, as distinct from the good of the members, can be made too important. Human development rather than national development must be our political objective; laws and states exist merely for the purpose of increasing the private happiness of those who live under them and in them. They are not and cannot be an end in themselves. The Reformation succeeded in removing the Conservative idol that was preventing human beings from attaining freedom of thought. The State has, however, usurped the throne of Jehovah, and a new Luther is needed to throw down that idol also and give freedom of action to humanity. Democracy has shown in its short history a tendency towards that freedom which it is the business of Liberalism to encourage. But Democracy, like Christianity, or any other Liberal movement, runs the danger of solidifying into a system and of losing its impetus towards freedom. German philosophers have put the snare of a Static State before its feet.

German philosophers have tempted it with the poisonous fruit of organized power. German philosophers have mystified it with the golden idol of the State. It is the work of Liberalism to see that Democracy does not fall a victim to the Conservative decadence which must always be the result of idolizing the State.

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CHAPTER IV

STATE CONTROL

HERE is something rather pathetic in the vision of Democracy demanding to be controlled by the State. It can only be compared with the lamb asking to be eaten by the wolf. Do they think the State does not wish to control them? Do they imagine that there is any conceivable Government machine that is not eager to make that control complete? When once a system of Government has been devised and is in operation, it is only by ceaseless vigilance that it can be prevented from being despotic, however Liberal its intentions may be. As for the Static State, we know that, based on a denial of progress and a low view of human virtue, it is essentially created to control us, and history proves that, once it has obtained some form of idolatrous sanction, it immediately proceeds to do so. The true Conservative will, if he can, leave hardly any action or any thought to the independent volition of the individual. This is not only because he has a contempt for the