developments of human life. The truth is that no system of government is suitable to all communities, and that even the community to which it is suitable cannot treat it as Static and suitable for all time.

Liberals believe in democracy, not as an end in itself, but, as Mill said, "the best available device for our present political condition." They believe in it because it is not Static like Socialism, but has a tendency towards increasing the liberty of the individual from the yoke of opinion and of law. They know that to a certain degree State interference with the liberty of the individual is at this time inevitable; but they desire to keep that degree as small as possible, and to make it ever smaller, instead of building up a system from the embraces of which the individual can never escape. Mill thought that the fruition of all progress was the expansion of the individual nature and the individual personality, free from every possible restraint and pressure, from every invasion and intrusion. It is because the Static State of Socialism holds out no hope of that fruition that Liberalism is bound to oppose it.

CHAPTER III

STATE IDOLATRY

THOSE wise men who make rules and draw up constitutions have always been confronted with the schoolmaster's difficulty of getting the wicked and unruly children to obey them. Nobody likes rules; on the contrary, their natural instinct is to evade them. Very few people can even be brought to admit that a rule as such can be a good one, or that the man who made it is any wiser than his neighbours. Men, like children, are easily provoked into disobedience.

Many people who are afraid of the damp never walk on the grass except when there is a notice forbidding them to do it. All decent men exceed the speed limit, and endeavour to elude the tax-collector. For the instinct of personal liberty is, fortunately for humanity, deeply engrained in our natures. The Static State, therefore, whose origins we have been examining, faced with the rebellious and insubordinate temperament of the mere mob beneath

it, have always searched for a sanction on which to base its authority. We have to be awed or cowed into submission and obedience. Some spiritual or moral sanction has to be produced before we will admit the divinity or majesty of the Static State. We know the We know the grubby hands of clay that wrote down these tiresome rules. We feel as a boy would feel if his schoolmaster turned out to be an old and much chaffed uncle; or as a girl would feel if she was asked to curtsey to a cousin democratically married to the King.

The production of reverence is a necessary preliminary to obedience. For obedience itself is purely artificial; it has to be so laboriously inculcated even into the very youngest children, and it is obtained with infinite difficulty even from the most ignorant of men. Wise and highly civilized men no doubt obey, through the instrumentality of reason, wise and civilized laws. But unfortunately by the time we get these wise and civilized laws we ourselves shall be so wise and civilized that we shall not require any laws at all. In the meantime our obedience has to be obtained by methods far other than that of reason. Most men are devoid of reason in the opinion of those wise constructors of the Static State; and, indeed, it is fortunate for the latter that they are, for the Static State would hardly bear even a most cursory examination by thẹ

light of it. But, as they are devoid of reason, men can be deceived by superstition into the obedience we require. An instinct to worship idols seems to have been an early and most useful characteristic of mankind; useful since it was so easy for the superior person to select the idol, to decorate it with the trappings he desired, and to manipulate it for his own ends.

The value of superstition and idolatry in politics was recognized in the very dawn of history. Moses, displaying even in his Liberal youth that distrust of humanity which was to develop into the rigid Conservatism of his old age, uses the meaner and lower instincts of patriotism to stir the sluggish mind of the people towards a desire for liberty. Because he is "slow of speech and of a slow tongue himself, he decides to employ the demagogic gifts of his brother Aaron as a "spokesman," and the patriotic appeal is to be the prospect of being led into a land flowing with milk and honey. But even then he is not sure that he will be accepted as the destined liberator, and he decides to give himself the necessary authority by saying that he comes to lead them with the sanction of the God of their fathers. The patriotic appeal and the divine authority remain for countless centuries the sanction of the State.

Later on, when Moses was building up his

elaborate theocratic system, we find him supporting it by divine authority, and obtaining for it by this means blind obedience and eternal submission. The real power of the Judge and the High Priest was carefully hidden behind the overwhelming and stultifying authority of such a dispensation. Aaron-and it is interesting to see how Moses in his youth employs his versatile and superficial brother as a sort of tribune in the cause of liberty, and then in his Conservative old age installs him as the High Priest of an efficient and Static State-and himself, and their carefully chosen successors, were to run this mystic theocracy, because otherwise the congregation would be "as sheep that have no shepherd."

We here get the first Conservative conception of that dual authority of Church and State both acting under divine sanction that had so profound an effect on the subsequent history of the world.

The Static State of Moses was based on spiritual idolatry, an idea contrary to the whole spirit of Liberalism. The individualistic doctrines of Christ prompted Him to make a direct attack upon theocracy. He never makes the slightest attempt to observe the customs and habits of the theocracy. We find him eating with publicans and sinners, allowing his disciples to pick corn on the Sabbath, to eat bread without