We should now set forth how the State, without pursuing a mystic aim of any kind, goes on expanding its functions. If indeed we work on the premise that the rights of the individual are not ipso facto his at birth; that they are not inscribed in the nature of things with such certainty as warrants the State in endorsing them and promulgating them; that, on the contrary, the rights have to be won from the opposing forces that deny them; that the State alone is qualified to play this part—then it cannot keep to the functions of supreme arbiter and of administrator of an entirely prohibitive justice, as the utilitarian or Kantian individualism would have it. No, the State must deploy energies equal to those for which it has to provide a counter-balance. It must even permeate all those secondary groups of family, trade and professional association, Church, regional areas and so on … which tend, as we have seen, to absorb the personality of their members. It must do this, in order to prevent this absorption and free these individuals, and so as to remind these partial societies that they are not alone and that there is a right that stands above their own rights. The State must therefore enter into their lives, it must supervise and keep a check on the way they operate and to do this it must spread its roots in all directions. For this task, it cannot just withdraw into the tribunals, it must be present in all spheres of social life and make itself felt. Wherever these particular collective forces exist, there the power of the State must be, to neutralize them: for if they were left alone and to their own devices, they would draw the individual within their exclusive domination. Now, societies are becoming ever greater in scale and ever more complex: they are made up of circles of increasing diversity, and of manifold agencies, and these already possess in themselves a value to be reckoned. Therefore if it is to fulfil its function, the State, too, must branch out and evolve to the same degree.
It would be easier to understand the need for this whole trend of expansion if we could form a better idea of the elements of these individual rights that the State secures by stages, overcoming the resistances of collective particularism. We may hold (with Spencer and Kant, to quote only the leaders of the school) that these rights derive from the very nature of the individual and only express the conditions necessary to him if he is to be himself. Then we are bound to conceive these rights as defined and determined once and for all, as well as that individual nature which they express and from which they derive. Take any human being: he is endowed with a certain mental and moral constitution; his rights are dependent on that constitution, being implicitly written into it, as it were. We could draw up an exhaustive and final list of them, with omissions no doubt, but there would be nothing indefinite about the list as it stood, and with adequate method, it could give a complete picture. If individual rights are to ensure a free functioning of the life of the individual, it only remains to settle what that life involves, to deduce the rights that must be conceded to the individual. For instance, according to Spencer, life in man presupposes a constant equilibrium between the vital energies and the exterior energies; this means that the process of repair must balance the expenditure of the energy or the wear and tear. Each one of us should therefore receive in exchange for his work a remuneration allowing him to repair the energies consumed by the work. That would be met if contracts were freely made and abided by, for the individual should never yield up what he has made or done in exchange for something of less value. Man, says Kant, is a moral being. His right derives from the moral nature he is endowed with and is thus determined by that very fact. This moral nature makes him inviolable; anything that assails his inviolability is a violation of this right. That is how those who uphold what is called natural right (or the theory of individual right deriving from individual nature) come to represent it as being something universal; that is, as a code that can be laid down once and for all, valid for every period as for every country. And this negative character they try to give to this right makes it, apparently, more easily definable.
But the postulate on which this theory rests has an artificial over-simplification. What lies at the base of individual right is not the notion of the individual as he is, but the way in which society puts the right into practice, looks upon it and appraises it. What matters, is not what the individual is, but how much he counts and on the other hand, what he ought to be. The reason why he has more or fewer rights, certain rights and not others, is not that he is constituted in a particular way; it is because society attributes this or that importance to him and attaches a higher or a lower value to what concerns him. If all that affects the individual affects the society, the society will react against all that might diminish him. This would not only forbid the slightest offences against him, but even more, the society would hold itself bound to work towards increasing his stature and towards his development. If, on the other hand, the individual is held in only moderate regard, the society will be indifferent even to serious outrages on him and will tolerate them. According to ideas current at the time, grave offences will appear as venial or, on the contrary, it may be held that liberal, unfettered expression should not be too much encouraged. Those who believe in that theory of natural right think they can make a final distinction between what is and what is not a right. However, a closer study will show that in reality the dividing line they think they can draw is certainly not definite and depends entirely on the state of public opinion. Spencer remarks that the remuneration shall be equal to the value of the labour—that this must be and suffices. But how is this balance to be settled? This value is a matter of opinion. It is said that the contracting parties must decide this, provided that they decide freely. But again, what does this freedom consist of? Nothing has fluctuated so much in the course of time as the idea of freedom of contract. With the Romans, the contract came into force at the moment its text was declared and it was the phrasing of the text that governed the engagements entered into and not the intention behind the words. Later, the intention began to come into the reckoning and the contract made under material duress was no longer held to be regular. Some forms of moral pressure likewise began to be ruled out. What brought about this development? The answer is, that people began to have a far loftier idea of the human person and the smallest attempt on his freedom became more intolerable. Everything points to this development not having ended yet, and to our becoming even more severe in this matter. Kant declares that the human person should be autonomous. But an absolute autonomy is out of the question. The human person forms part of the physical and social milieu; he is bound up with it and his autonomy can be only relative. And then, what degree of autonomy is appropriate to him? It is obvious that the answer depends on the state of mind of the societies—that is, on the state of public opinion. There was a time when material servitude, imposed in certain conditions, seemed in no wise immoral; we have abolished it, but how many forms of moral servitude still survive? Can we say that a man who has nothing to live on governs himself, that he is master of his actions? Which kinds of subordination, then, are legitimate and which unlawful? There is no final answer to these problems.
The rights of the individual, then, are in a state of evolution: progress is always going on and it is not possible to set any bounds to its course. What yesterday seemed but a kind of luxury becomes overnight a right precisely defined. The task incumbent on the State, then, has no limits. It is not merely that it has to work out a definite ideal that sooner or later has to be attained, and that finally. But the field open to its moral activity is immeasurable. There is no reason why it should ever cease to be so or the work ever be considered as finished. Everything indicates that we are becoming more alive to what touches on the human personality. Even if we fail to foresee the coming changes along these lines and in this spirit, our lack of imagination does not warrant our shutting our eyes to them. Besides, there are already many changes that we can foresee will be necessary. These considerations explain more clearly the continuous advance of the State and its justification, to some extent: they allow us to assume that far from being some kind of passing anomaly, this advance is bound to go on indefinitely in the future.
Meanwhile, it is now easier to see there was no exaggeration in saying that our moral individuality, far from being antagonistic to the State, has on the contrary been a product of it. It is the State that sets it free. And this gradual liberation does not simply serve to fend off the opposing forces that tend to absorb the individual: it also serves to provide the milieu in which the individual moves, so that he may develop his faculties in freedom. There is nothing negative in the part played by the State. Its tendency is to ensure the most complete individuation that the state of society will allow of. Far from its tyrannizing over the individual, it is the State that redeems the individual from the society. But whilst this aim is essentially positive, it has nothing transcendental about it for the individual consciousness, for it is an aim that is also essentially human. There is no difficulty in understanding its appeal, for ultimately it concerns ourselves. Individuals can become instruments of the State without any inconsistency, since the action of the State is towards giving them reality. We do not, even so, follow Kant and Spencer in making them into absolutes, as it were, almost self-sufficing, or into egotisms knowing only self-interest. For although this aim concerns them all, it cannot in the main be identified with the aim of any one of them in particular. It is not this or that individual the State seeks to develop, it is the individual in genere, who is not to be confused with any single one of us. And whilst we give the State our co-operation—and it could do nothing without it—we do not become the agents of a purpose alien to us; we do not give up the pursuit of an impersonal aim which belongs to a region above all our own private aims but which nevertheless has close ties with them. On the one hand, our concept of the State has nothing mystic about it, and yet, it is still in its essence individualistic.
The fundamental duty of the State is laid down in this very fact: it is to persevere in calling the individual to a moral way of life. I say fundamental duty, for civic morals can have no pole-star for guide except moral causes. If the cult of the human person is to be the only one destined to survive, as it seems, it must be observed by the State as by the individual equally. This cult, moreover, has all that is required to take the place of the religious cults of former times. It serves quite as well as they to bring about that communion of minds and wills which is a first condition of any social life. It is just as simple for men to draw together to work for the greatness of man as it is to work to the glory of Zeus or Jehovah or Athena. The whole difference of this religion, as it affects the individual, is that the god of its devotion is closer to his worshippers. But although not far removed, he does nevertheless still transcend them, and the rôle of the State in this respect is what it was formerly. It rests with it, shall we say, to organize the cult, to be the head of it and to ensure its regular working and development.
Shall we say that this is the sole duty incumbent on the State and that its whole activity should be directed into this channel? It might be so if every society lived in isolation, without having to fear any hostile acts. But we know that international competition has not yet ended and that even ‘civilised’ States still live to some extent on a war footing in their interrelations. They threaten one another, and since the first duty of the State towards its members is to preserve intact the collective entity they make up, it must to that extent organize itself accordingly. It must be ready to defend itself, perhaps even to attack if it feels menaced. This whole form of organization presupposes a different kind of moral discipline from that implicit in the cult of the human being. It has an entirely different cast of direction. Its goal is a national collectivity and not the individual. It is a survival of the discipline of other days, since the former conditions of existence have not yet ceased to operate. There are, then, two diverging currents flowing through our moral life. It would be failing to recognize the existing state of affairs, if we wished to reduce this duality to unity here and now, if we wished to do away with all these institutions, all these practices inherited from the past, straight away, whilst the conditions that created them still survive. Just as we cannot make it a fact that individual personality shall not have reached the stage of evolution that it has, so we cannot make it a fact that international competition shall not have preserved a military form. Hence come these duties of an entirely different nature for the State. Nothing even warrants our assuming that some part of them will not always continue to exist. As a rule, the past never disappears entirely. Something of it always survives into the future. That said, it remains to add that, as we progress, so these duties (as explained)—once fundamental and essential, become secondary and anomalous: that is, always providing that nothing unusual occurs and there are no fortuitous setbacks. Once, the action of the State was directed entirely outwards: now, inevitably, it tends more and more to turn inwards. For it is through this whole structure of the State and through it alone, that society can succeed in achieving the aim it has to put foremost. And there is not likely to be any lack of substance to work on here. The planning of the social milieu so that the individual may realise himself more fully, and the management of the collective apparatus in a way that will bear less hard on the individual; an assured and amicable exchange of goods and services and the co-operation of all men of good will towards an ideal they share without any conflict: in these, surely, we have enough to keep public activity fully employed. No European country is free of internal problems and difficulties, and as we go on, so will these problems multiply. That is so, because, as social life becomes more complex, so does the working of its functions become more delicate. Further, since the more highly developed systems are precariously balanced and need greater care if they are to be kept going, societies will have a growing need to concentrate their energies on themselves to husband their strength, instead of expending them outwards in violent demonstrations.
This is where Spencer’s arguments have some plausibility. He saw clearly that the receding of war and of the social forms or methods bound up with it was certain to affect the life of all societies very deeply. But it does not follow that this recession leaves no other sustenance for social life than economic interests and that there must inevitably be a choice between militarism and commercialism. If, to use his expression, the organs of depredation tend to disappear, this does not mean that the organs of a vegetative system should entirely take their place, nor that the social organs should one day be reduced to no more than a vast digestive apparatus. There is an inward activity that is neither economic nor commercial and this is moral activity. Those forces that turn from the outward to the inward are not simply used to produce as much as possible and to add to creature comfort, but to organize and raise the moral level of society, to uphold this moral structure and to see that it goes on developing. It is not merely a matter of increasing the exchanges of goods and services, but of seeing that they are done by rules that are more just; it is not simply that everyone should have access to rich supplies of food and drink. Rather, it is that each one should be treated as he deserves, each be freed from an unjust and humiliating tutelage, and that, in holding to his fellows and his group, a man should not sacrifice his individuality. And the agency on which this special responsibility lies is the State. So the State does not inevitably become either simply a spectator of social life (as the economists would have it), in which it intervenes only in a negative way, or (as the socialists would have it), simply a cog in the economic machine. It is above all, supremely the organ of moral discipline. It plays this part at the present time as it did formerly, although the discipline has changed. (Here we see the error of the socialists.)
The conclusion that we reach here gives an indication how one of the gravest conflicts of our day might be solved. By this I mean the conflict that has come about between equally high-minded kinds of sentiment—those we associate with a national ideal and the State that embodies it, and those we associate with the human ideal and mankind in general—in a word, between patriotism and world patriotism. This conflict was unknown to the ancient world, because in those days one cult alone was possible: this was the cult of the State, whose public religion was but the symbolic form of that State. For the worshippers there was therefore nothing to allow of choice or hesitation. They could conceive of nothing above the State, above its fame and greatness. But since then, things have changed. No matter how devoted men may be to their native land, they all to-day are aware that beyond the forces of national life there are others, in a higher region and not so transitory, for they are unrelated to conditions peculiar to any given political group and are not bound up with its fortunes. There is something more universal and more enduring. It is true to say that those aims that are the most general and the most unchanging are also the most sublime. As we advance in evolution, we see the ideals men pursue breaking free of the local or ethnic conditions obtaining in a certain region of the world or a certain human group, and rising above all that is particular and so approaching the universal. We might say that the moral forces come to have a hierarchic order according to their degree of generality or diffusion.
Thus, everything justifies our belief that national aims do not lie at the summit of this hierarchy—it is human aims that are destined to be supreme.
On this basis, it has sometimes been held that patriotism could be regarded simply as a survival that would disappear before long. Here, however, we face another problem. In fact, man is a moral being only because he lives within established societies. There are no morals without discipline and authority, and the sole rational authority is the one that a society is endowed with in relation to its members. Morals do not look like obligations to us, that is, do not seem like morals to us—and therefore we can have no sense of duty—unless there exist about us and above us a power which gives them sanction. Not that the material sanction covers the whole of the duty, but it is the outward sign by which this is recognized, and manifest evidence that there is something above us to which we are subordinate. It is true that the believer is free to make an image of this power for himself in the shape of a superhuman being, inaccessible to reason or science. But for the theme under discussion, we need not debate the hypothesis or examine what is and what is not well founded about the symbol. The fact that shows us to what degree a social structure is necessary to morality is that any disorganization, any tendency to political anarchy, is accompanied by a rise in immorality. This is not solely because the criminal has a better chance of escaping punishment; it is that in general the sense of duty is weakened, because men no longer have a strong sense of there being anything above them to which they are subject. Now, patriotism is precisely the ideas and feelings as a whole which bind the individual to a certain State. If we suppose it to have weakened or to have ceased to exist, where is an individual to find this moral authority, whose curb is to this extent salutary? If there is no clearly defined society there with a consciousness of itself to remind him continually of his duties and to make him realize the need for rules, how should he be aware of all this? Let us take those who believe that morals themselves are inborn and exist a priori in the consciousness of each one, and who believe, too, that a man has only to look within his own breast to know what they consist of and needs only a little goodwill to understand that he should submit to them. To these, the State would indeed appear something entirely exterior to morals and therefore it seems that it might lose its dominion without there being any loss to morality. But since we know that morals are a product of the society, that they permeate the individual from without and that in some respects they do violence to his physical nature and his natural temperament, we can understand the better that morals are what the society is and that they have force only so far as the society is organized. At the present day, the State is the highest form of organized society that exists. Some forms of belief in a world State, or world patriotism do themselves get pretty close to an egotistic individualism. Their effect is to disparage the existing moral law, rather than to create others of higher merit. It is for this reason that so many minds resist these tendencies, though realizing that they have something logical and inevitable.
There might indeed be a solution of the problem in theory: this is to imagine humanity in its entirety organized as a society. Need we say that such an idea, whilst not altogether beyond realization, must be set in so distant a future that we can leave it out of our present reckoning. A confederation of European States, for instance, is advanced, but vainly, as a half-way course to achieving societies on a bigger scale than those we know to-day. This greater federation, again, would be like an individual State, having its own identity and its own interests and features. It would not be humanity.
There is however a means of reconciling the two ideas. That is, for the national to merge with the human ideal, for the individual States to become, each in their own way, the agencies by which this general idea is carried into effect. If each State had as its chief aim, not to expand, or to lengthen its borders, but to set its own house in order and to make the widest appeal to its members for a moral life on an ever higher level, then all discrepancy between national and human morals would be excluded. If the State had no other purpose than making men of its citizens, in the widest sense of the term, then civic duties would be only a particular form of the general obligations of humanity. It is this course that evolution takes, as we have already seen. The more societies concentrate their energies inwards, on the interior life, the more they will be diverted from the disputes that bring a clash between cosmopolitism—or world patriotism, and patriotism; as they grow in size and get greater complexity, so will they concentrate more and more on themselves. Here we see how the advent of societies on an even bigger scale than those we know will constitute an advance in the future.
So that what breaks down the paradox is the tendency of patriotism to become, as it were, a fragment of world patriotism. It is a different concept of it that so often leads to conflict. True patriotism, it seems, is only exhibited in forms of collective action directed towards the world without; it seems to us as if we could only show loyalty to our own patriotic or national group at times when it is at strife with some other group. True, these external crises yield plenty of occasions for brilliantly devoted service.
But alongside this patriotism there is another kind, more given to silence but whose effective action is also more sustained; this patriotism is directed towards the interior affairs of the society and not its exterior expansion. It in no wise excludes any national pride: the collective personality and the individual personalities alike can have no existence without an awareness of themselves, of what they are, and this awareness has always something personal. As long as there are States, so there will be national pride, and nothing can be more warranted. But societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitution. To be sure, we have not yet reached the point when this kind of patriotism could prevail without dissent, if indeed such a time could ever come.