name. I do not mean, of course, that this conception of the State is in any sense peculiar to Hegel (if it were, he might be an "original thinker," but he would not be the typical philosopher of his age); but simply that he has given the completest expression to that organic conception of human society which has begun to free political theory and practice from the narrowness and false abstractions of the individualist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Mr. Mann holds that the antithesis has a purely regulative or subjective value (like the conceptions of abstract political economy), but no objective or historical reality. How then did this antithesis, which seems so conspicuously absent from the writings of Plato and Aristotle, come to be so prominent as it is in our modern way of thinking and speaking? "May it be suggested," says Mr. Mann, “that Hegel's conception of the antithesis is partly reminiscent of the Social Contract, partly due to the circumstances of Germany in his time? In Prussia there were definitely marked orders or 'estates,' Now this latter sugges tion suggests a good deal more. But what I am going to say as to the historical genesis of the distinction must be taken as purely tentative.

" etc.

The antithesis, I have said, is conspicuously absent from the writings of Plato and Aristotle. With respect to Aristotle, a slight qualification must be made. In distinguishing "Economics" (the science of household-management) from "Politics," Aristotle has given the starting-point for the antithesis for his discussion of Economics in Politics, Book I., deals with many subjects which we should not put

:

under the rubric "Family." The "social and economic' questions of slavery, hired labour, property, etc., fall under his science of "Economics," and are treated of apart from and preliminary to the main subjects of Politics. Aristotle's conservatism, moreover, leads him to save the family and private property from the absorption and annihilation they undergo in Plato's ideal state, in which there is no social institution that is not a political institution. Nevertheless, when Aristotle comes to sketch out his own "best state" (a sketch indeed that is, in all probability, unfinished), we find him mainly occupied with "social" questions, such as health, marriage, education, etc.: as to political organisation he has comparatively little to say. Take along with this his opposition to the "Sophistic" theory that the State has no moral functions, but has only to protect individual rights (Pol. III. 9, § 8), and we see that in the famous sentence, "Man is by nature a political animal," something very much more is meant by "political" than suggests itself at once to the modern ear. In the De Regimine Principum which has come down to us among the works of Thomas Aquinas, and the first book of which (along with part of the second) is generally accepted as his, the equivalent of this Aristotelian dictum is to be found in the words, "homo est animal sociale et politicum" (in his Commentary on the Politics Thomas Aquinas writes "civile et domesticum"). Is not this insertion of "sociale" alongside of "politicum" significant of the different way in which the State presented itself to the mind of the Greek and to the mind of the medieval philosopher?

Now where are we to look for an explanation of this

difference save in the effects of the Roman Empire? The Romans "devoured and broke in pieces" the states of the old world, and through the long centuries of the pax Romana we may say that within the wide limits of the Empire there existed Society without the State, except as a "negatively regulative" institution. Citizenship, when made co-extensive with the Roman world, had no longer any political meaning: it gave only certain legal and social privileges. The State would appear to the individual as merely the machinery for defending Society against the aggression of barbarians from without, and for maintaining order and enforcing contracts within. When Western Europe began, with the help of the Roman Church, to emerge from the chaos into which the downfall of the Empire had thrown it, in that curious combination of archaic barbarian usage and late Roman law, which resulted in Feudalism, Society found itself arranged in certain more or less definite castes, which, for illustration's sake, I may describe as horizontal layers; the vertical divisions which mark off one nation from another were as yet faint and ill-defined compared with some of the horizontal dividing lines. Thus the clergy, with their Latin tongue, had more in common with one another than with the laity of their own particular country; and "clergy" in the early middle ages meant almost the entire brain-working population. A medieval university was a cosmopolitan, not a national institution. To a less extent the same would hold of the nobility. The nobles of different countries had more in common with one another than with the clergy or commons of their own land. They might fight with one

another, it is true; but they did that often enough, even though they had sworn allegiance to the same king. A fight to them was just like a disputation to the clergy: it did not interrupt a general community of caste feeling. The noble of one country could marry the noble of another more easily than a commoner of his own. (Contrast the Greek tendency to forbid marriage with aliens.) The Almanach de Gotha represents a modern survival of this international social layer. The horizontal lines in the lower social strata were in medieval times less continuous, and the vertical lines relatively more distinct; but so soon as trade and commerce began to rise again, their international character showed itself in spite of State action (hostile tariffs, differences of currency, etc.), and has grown continuously till, at the present time, to the banking and commercial community, nationality is chiefly a matter of accident or convenience. The partners in the same business may purposely make themselves citizens of different nations. Lastly, the international solidarity of labour has first become conscious of itself in the present century. The "nationality movement" has, indeed, culminated in this. age; but it began very long ago. England, geographically fortunate, felt itself a united nation in the earlier middle ages, France in the later. Germany at the beginning of this century was one Society, arranged in class layers, but many "States." The French Revolution proclaimed fraternity, but its immediate consequence was an intensification of national feeling. Instead of breaking through the vertical lines it made them more distinct; and now, at length, we have again many nations which are the equivalents of

Greek city-states. And as of old, Society and State tend to coincide, political questions to become identical with social questions.

Does this mean, as in ancient Hellas, a perpetuation of strife between rival states? The outlook is not hopeful, but neither is it hopeless; for the modern "nationality movement" has been democratic, and the very class which now makes the State become social or "socialistic" is also the class which begins to feel its international solidarity

the most.

But it is impossible to write a philosophy of history in a brief note, and I must avoid the dangerous region of prophecy. I only suggest that the growth of national (State) feeling, sime it is the very thing which has put an end to popular jealousy of State action, is itself a valuable step in the transition to something beyond the "natural" state of war between nation and nation. The several nations have had to become conscious of themselves by antagonism; but the moment the nationality question is settled, the social question appears and produces a new feeling of common interest among the larger part of the population.