CHAPTER VII

THE STATE

The leading theories of the state should be kept in view for comparison with the ethical theory here set forth—the theories of Aristotle and Plato, St. Augustine and the mediæval schoolmen, Rousseau’s contract theory, and the German conceptions of the state propounded by Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Moreover, since the ideas actually embodied in governments, in the Persian monarchy, for instance, in the Greek City State, Venice, etc., are not identical with the constructions of the philosophers, the leading facts of the history of politics should be borne in mind as well as the leading theories.

The state has two aspects: (1) It is the balance wheel of the vocational groups included within it. (2) It is the political expression of the national character, and its ethical purpose is to develop this empirical national character into a spiritual character. I shall speak of the first aspect in this chapter.

1. The state exists in order to furnish increasingly from age to age the conditions under which the reactions between the groups described above can take place effectually. In concentrating attention upon the vocational groups as the entities to be harmonized with one another, account is taken by implication of the family and of the individual. The sub-organisms are embraced within the superior organisms. A more general statement would be that the state supplies the external conditions required for development towards ethical personality by those who pass through the institutions of the family, of the vocation, etc.

The state possesses a spiritual character in so far as it supplies these conditions, and in as much as it has a spiritual character it is not merely justified but ethically required to use force. Force is spiritualized when employed to establish the conditions indispensable to spiritual life. The conditions enforced must be such as in the opinion of the preponderant number of citizens indisputably make for the development of personality. Examples of such conditions are protection of life, property, reputation, compulsory education, the maintenance of the monogamic family, protection against foreign invasion, etc. All the functions of the state commonly enumerated follow from the ethical principle. But over and above the recognized ones, new and nobler functions of the state will appear.

The redeeming thought with respect to the use of force by the state consists in regarding _force as ethical discipline_, and in making the extent to which it is favorable to spiritual freedom the measure and test of its rightful use.[85] When men are compelled to spend the major part of their time in the protection of bare life, as was the case, for instance, in the early days of feudalism, they are to that extent unfree. Freedom consists in energizing the highest and most distinctive human faculties.

_The development of the state_ should proceed in two directions. It should withdraw from many functions exercised by it in the past, notably from such as properly belong to the sub-organisms. At the same time, it should lay its coercive hands upon new matters, imposing new limitations on capricious freedom in the interest of spiritual freedom, as soon as the pertinency of such limitations to the ethical end becomes clear. For instance, the state may, and doubtless will, interfere with marriage to a far greater extent than it has yet done. It will forbid the marriage of the unsound. If a study of character-types should ever become advanced enough—a hazardous conjecture—to make it predictable that the union of certain character-types will lead to infelicitous marriage, the state will be justified in prohibiting such unions.

_Law_, ideally defined, is the sum total of conditions, capable of being enforced, which are necessary or favorable to the development of personality. The purpose of law is two-fold: to maintain the more developed members of society at the level they have reached, and, by educative penalties, to bring the backward up to the same level. In the article on “Force and Freedom” referred to above, law is compared to such bodily actions as walking, which at first are superintended by consciousness, and then become automatic, thereby setting consciousness free to attend to new and more important business. Similarly, law is designed to render the conditions favorable to personality so explicit that their observance shall become automatic, and that mankind shall be at liberty to discover new and more significant conditions which in their turn are again to become automatic.

Because of the lack of the ethical point of view, the exercise of force by the state has seemed purely arbitrary, and has given rise to a perverted and disastrous conception of _sovereignty_. The sovereignty of the state has two aspects: the one internal, the other external. Sovereignty means supremacy. The state is sovereign, within limits, however, with respect to its citizens. The state is also sovereign, within limits, however, with respect to other outside states.

With respect to the internal aspect of sovereignty some writers hold that citizens have no rights as against the state—only rights accorded by the state. But this from the ethical point of view is a wholly untenable position. There are rights of the individual, rights of the family, rights of the vocational group, which the state does not create but is bound to acknowledge and which its power cannot properly infringe. As against the state the individual has, for instance, the right which is commonly designated as “the freedom of conscience.” The family has rights against the state; the law cannot interfere with the intimacies of the marriage and parental relations. The vocational group likewise is only partially subject to public reglementation. I have defined law as the sum total of the conditions. The state can prescribe the conditions, but cannot trace the ways of freedom within the conditions. The state prescribes the enforceable conditions; it has no concern with unenforceable inner processes.

It thus appears that sovereignty or supremacy is an attribute not peculiar to the state, although it looms up larger and more impressive when exercised by the state. Supremacy belongs to the individual in his private sphere, to the family in its proper province, to the vocation, etc. Sovereignty or supremacy belongs to each of the social institutions within its precincts, in so far as the supremacy within that precinct is requisite for the accomplishment of the ethical end to be therein attained. But sovereignty is not absolute in any sphere; neither in that of the individual, nor of the family, nor yet of the state. _The absolute conception of sovereignty is the result of the lack of an ethical conception of the social institutions._ The state is sovereign only so far as the exercise of its supremacy is necessary to the spiritual end of citizenship. On this account and for this purpose it may rightfully constrain the sub-organisms within it, and may also pronounce its _noli me tangere_ as against the larger group of states encompassing it. But so far as the spiritual ends to be achieved in the international relations are concerned, the state with respect to these is subject to international sovereignty,—a new conception which mankind is striving to bring to the birth today. The false notion of state sovereignty as arbitrary and absolute, is admittedly today a chief stumbling-block in the way of the formation of an international organization of peoples.

_The System of Representation Which Is Required to Give Expression to the Organic Idea of the State._

The ethical aim of political reformation and reconstruction may be put in a single word, Organization. _The state and especially the democratic state must be organized._[86] This means practically that the basis of representation shall be the vocational group, that vocational representation shall replace representation by geographical districts.[87] The law-making body on this basis will consist of representatives or delegates of the agricultural, the commercial, the industrial, the scientific group, etc. Women belonging to these groups will exercise the franchise within them. There will also be a distinct group of home-makers; motherhood will be recognized as a vocation.

Attention may be called to certain practical advantages of the proposed rearrangement of the representative system. It will tend to bring forward in political life the best citizens, instead of the mediocre or the base. This is likely to come about because there is no distinction that men more ardently covet than that of being considered _primus inter pares_; as, for instance, the first or one of the first of the city’s merchants, or one of the most eminent scientists, or an artist whom his fellow-artists select as the fittest to represent them in the great council of city, state, or nation. And if only this much can be gained by the new representative system, that the law-making body shall consist of the most experienced, the most enlightened, the wisest, the actual leaders in the various walks of life, in brief, that the elected shall be the elect, certainly one of the principal evils with which individualistic democracy is afflicted will tend to be removed.

But other advantages will accrue. This, in particular, that the constituencies, instead of merely delegating their powers, will share in the business of law-making, will be in vital touch with their leaders or representatives, while the latter conversely will politically educate the constituencies. The mode of procedure under the system here sketched will be somewhat as follows:

Take, as an illustration, the group of industrial laborers. They will first meet in a primary assembly, and discuss measures deemed by them important in the interests of their group. The leader who represents them in the legislature will take part in the initial discussions, and exercise no doubt a strong influence in bringing matter finally to a head. He will then carry into the law-making body,—which consists of representatives of the various social groups,—the sifted-out demands of the laborers, the measures which they desire to have enacted into law. He will bring forward these measures in the legislature. But there objections are likely to be raised. The representatives of the other groups will discover what the laborers naturally failed to note, that the proposed law or laws, if enacted, will have certain injurious effects on the interests of the other groups. The sifting-out process, therefore, will now begin anew and be carried on on a higher level in the legislature. The representatives of all the various groups will separate the wheat from the chaff in what is proposed by any one group. The next stop will be that the representative of the laborers, returning to his constituency, will communicate to them the difficulties that were raised, the decisions reached, and will thus impart to them the wider vision which he himself gained in the discussions of the law-making body. In this way he will be the instructor, the political teacher of his constituents. And the principle by which the value of any new measure will finally be judged will be simply this: that the supposed interests of one group cannot be its true interests unless they are found to promote the interests of all the other vocational groups.[88]

The law-making body should be a council of the groups. It should not be a “Parliament,” or “talking body,” but a sifting body. Nor yet a body of mandatories commissioned to merely give effect to a public opinion or a public sentiment already existing. In fact, public opinion or public sentiment in the raw is apt to be a poor index of what is really for the public good. Public opinion is apt to be unripe, haphazard, impulsive rather than reflective. Besides, it is often contaminated at its very source, the facts on which the public depend for their opinions being deliberately falsified or placed in false perspective; while the opinions furnished in newspaper editorials are almost inevitably biased. Only on great occasions, when simple moral issues are presented, can the common sense and moral sense of the people be wholly depended on. But such occasions are episodical; and the orderly business of government cannot be carried on by spurts. Government by public opinion may be and in some respects is better indeed than class government; in other important respects it is worse. A class at the head of the state at least as a rule knows what it wants, and proceeds methodically to carry out its purposes. Public opinion, on the other hand, like all opinion, is unsure, unsafe, as Plato has long since made dialectically clear. And public sentiment, like all sentiment, is fluctuating. To build the state on public opinion and public sentiment, as many of our writers on politics would have us do, is after all a good deal like building a house on sand.[89]

Instead of “public opinion” and “public sentiment” let us say public reason and public will!—reason and will to discover in conjunction what the public good really is. For what it really is no one as yet knows. The “public good” is a problem to be approximately solved. The public good will be consummated when the conditions are furnished necessary and favorable to the development of personality in each of the constituent groups of the social body. To study these conditions is the office of the law-making body, and therefore that body must be so constituted as to include these groups in their capacity as groups.

Another advantage to be expected from vocational representation is that the different interests of society,—I stress the fact that they are different, and often temporarily conflicting,—will be compelled under this plan to come out into the open. An industry, for instance, may require the assistance of a protective tariff, in its infant stages, and the agricultural group may rightly be asked to make the necessary sacrifices.

In the long run there will be compensation. The agriculturists will eventually benefit by the diversification of the national life. But “in the long run” means that the next generation will benefit, not the present agriculturists, a distinction sometimes somewhat cavalierly ignored. The present generation will be called upon to make a sacrifice, precisely as in the family some of the members may have to sacrifice a part of their income to provide for a weaker member. But the circumstance that the sacrifice is recognized as a sacrifice will serve to put an end to the protection when the special need for it has ceased. Under the present system, on the other hand, the state is supposed to have no concern with the special interests of any group. All the same, there are the special interests, and in consequence that which is for the interest of one group has to be advocated as if it were for the general interest of the entire community. And since general interest is easily mistaken for perpetual interest, the protection is apt to be continued long after its particular usefulness has ceased.[90]

I am earnestly concerned that vocational representation shall not be regarded as a mere device in the mechanism of politics, like the substitution of the long for the short ballot, or the initiative and referendum. Innovations of the latter kind leave the prevalent conception of democracy untouched, they are merely intended to improve the machinery by which that conception is to be worked out in practice; they are mechanical contrivances, not fundamental reconstructions. Vocational representation, in my view of it, is the appropriate expression of the organic idea of the state. The state is the soul. The soul must have a body. Vocational representation is that body.

Two remarks may here be added. One relates to a question which has given rise to considerable discussion, namely, the question where the state resides? In a monarchy it seems to reside visibly in the person of the king. Louis XIV is said to have declared “I am the state.” But where does it reside in a democracy? The chief executive, the law-making body, and even the constituencies, are organs of the state. But where does the state itself have its habitation? The state has no separate domicile. So far as it truly exists at all it exists in the minds of the individuals who truly conceive of it. The object of political life is to educate the citizen so that he may more and more truly conceive of the state, so that he may give birth to the state idea within himself. To do this is to pass through one of the necessary phases on the road to personality. In the family the individual is in reactive relations with a few, in the vocation with a larger number. In the state or nation he may be one of a hundred millions or more. Yet it is not the numerical extension as such that constitutes the enlargement. It is rather the diversity of the points of contact, and the complexity of the relations by which the spiritual ideal is more fully illustrated in the finite world in proportion as the circle widens. To engender the idea of the state in oneself is to place oneself ideally into reactive relations with the diverse groups embraced within one’s nation. And to do this is a spiritual achievement of no mean order. I should prefer to use the word “stateship” instead of citizenship. Stateship is attained by one who brings to birth within himself the idea of the state, and in whom that idea becomes a controlling ethical force.

A second remark concerns the perplexed subject of the conflict of duties. The nearer duties are sometimes preferred to the more remote, and at other times we are asked to sacrifice everything to the larger whole. We owe our first devotion, it is said, to the members of our family; but then again we must be willing to sacrifice life itself and the welfare of our family to our country when it calls upon us in its need. Largeness alone certainly does not serve as an ethical ground for preference. The quantitative standard implied in such phrases as “the greatest good of the greatest number” is out of place when we deal with ethical relations, which in their very nature are qualitative. Now the account of the social institutions given in previous chapters as successive stations on the road to the spiritual goal may throw some light on this difficult subject. Normally, the claims of the anterior stations are to be preferred—the claims of the family for instance to those of the vocation, because the family is the matrix of the three-fold reverence, and the individual must pass under the ethical influence of family life before he is fit to use vocational life ethically to good purpose. The anterior groups are not merely smaller, they are germinal. The training received in them is the condition on which spiritual progress depends later on. On the other hand, the later groups are the more complete and more explicated expressions of the spiritual ideal; hence if the very existence of one of the later groups is threatened, or is in danger of being denatured of its spiritual use, then the later group is to be preferred to the earlier, the _terminus ad quem_, precisely because it is the _terminus ad quem_, to the _terminus a quo_.

To give a familiar illustration. In our time, which is a time of transition and doubt, many a religious teacher finds himself in sore straits to decide between the claims of the vocation and the family. As a religious teacher he is pledged to teach only what in his heart of hearts he believes to be true; he is especially under obligation to use words in such a way as to convey to others the same meaning that he attaches to them himself. But this may mean exposing his family to serious privations. The situation is full of perplexity and pain, but the line of choice is plain enough. The claims of his high vocation must in this case take precedence. In like manner, when the existence or the integrity of the state is at issue, the claims of the state as the _terminus ad quem_ override those of the vocation, the family, and the state, and may even demand the sacrifice of the physical existence of the individual himself.

NOTES

1. The idea of democracy is often neatly put—all too neatly, into the following formula: In antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state, in modern democracy the state exists for the sake of the individual. Both of these statements as they stand are mischievous and misleading and require to be qualified. It is not true that in antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state in the sense that his separate existence was extinguished. The citizen class in Aristotle’s state, the rulers in Plato’s state, and even a member of one of the inferior classes, each in his own way fulfilled a distinct function. He was not suppressed in the state, he expressed his function by the action appropriate to his station. The philosophic rulers might do the thinking and governing. They were the head of the body politic—others the hands and feet. The underlying conception was what may be called spuriously organic, borrowed more or less from the animal type of organism.

The second limb of the formula is no less superficial. In no modern nation does the state exist, or at bottom is it supposed to exist, for the benefit of the individuals who at any time compose it. If this were the ruling conception, how could the democratic state require its citizens to give up their lives in its defense? If the state existed for the benefit of the individuals, the state would be the means, and the so-called good of the individual the end. And in that case it would surely be irrational to sacrifice the end for the sake of the means, in other words to put an end to one’s life in defense of the state, a mere instrument for the protection and prosperity of one’s own life.

To reply that the state exists for the sake not of one individual but of all (observe however that the formula says “the individual,” and is ambiguous and slippery at this point), nor even only for the sake of all the individuals now living, but also for the sake of the millions yet unborn—to say this is once more to introduce an ideal entity which it was the very object of the formula as quoted to banish. The formula was intended to give us, in place of “the metaphysical entities” of the Greeks and the Germans, a very palpable thing—the good of the individual. The good of the individual seemed to be a palpable thing, though in truth it is the most impalpable thing in the world. And by defining the state in this wise we were supposed to come onto solid ground. But now, behold, it is the good of unborn millions which is to be the object of our devotion, and who can imagine what this good of unborn millions is likely to be?

The fact is that without ideal entities the conception of the state in any noble shape cannot be construed at all. The organic conception must now take the place of the individualistic. The organic conception indeed as it was worked out in antiquity, or as it lived on in the theories of mediæval writers, or as it survives in the works of certain German publicists, who use it to defend the feudalistic structure of society, has rightly fallen into discredit,—not because it is organic, but because it is pseudo-organic, that is, based on the type of the animal organism. The individualistic conception of the state at present current in America and in all modern democracies, is a violent reaction against this false idea of organization. The inestimable germ of truth individualism contains is that no such distinction can be allowed as between head and hands or feet in political life, that all the multitudes of “hands” who work in the factories, for instance, must be respected as personalities having not only hands but also heads and hearts. But individualism, though it affirms this idea, belies it in practice, as the actual state of society in America and elsewhere abundantly proves. And it is bound to do so, because personality implies more than material well-being, either for a single individual or for all individuals now living or for all future individuals. Personality implies truly organic relations to other fellow-beings—and this can only be achieved by organizing the society in which men live.

The way taken has been, by reaction from pseudo-organization, to extreme individualism and concomitant materialism. The way out lies in the direction of genuine organization.

2. Certain evils observable in the workings of American democracy may be traced to the following causes:

(a) The people as a whole are still in the pioneer stage. A country enormously rich in material resources stimulates wealth-production. A host of immigrants escaped from poverty abroad are stung into wealth-getting here. The frontier line is now far to the West, but the influence of the pioneer movement still in progress flows back upon the Eastern states.

(b) More important still are the evils due to the crude individualistic idea of democracy just characterized. If the state exists for the good of the individual, and if the good of the individual is conceived to be the acquisition of wealth, then private business will take precedence of the public business. Yet under the democratic system of frequent elections the public business demands constant attention. In consequence, a special class of professional politicians arises, comprising a minority of disinterestedly patriotic men, and a majority of persons whose private business is not sufficiently remunerative to divert them from the public service. The appearance of the political dictator called “boss” is the inevitable outcome of these conditions. This army of professional politicians, and in particular the vulgar figure at their hand, is the chief disgrace of the American democracy, and has been the target of incessant invective by American writers. But it is idle to stigmatize the effect and overlook the cause, to squander invective upon the symptom and at the same time to leave the malady untouched. The malady itself is the individualistic conception of democracy, and until this is replaced by a better one, the evil in question may be modified in form but will certainly not disappear.

A way must be found for the citizen to attend to his private business, which is coming to be more and more exacting, and to the public business at the same time. The system of vocational representation offers an opportunity in this direction. Citizens will be voting in their vocational groups for measures intended to advance their vocational interests, but will be taught to advance them in such a way that the related interests of other groups, or the public interest, shall be thereby promoted.

3. Proportional representation, which is at present being tested abroad, and earnestly considered in France, England and Germany, may be a bridge leading over from the present plan of geographical to that of vocational representation. The proportional system itself, it is true, is still based on the individualistic idea. It is a movement on behalf of submerged minorities. It quarrels with the present arrangement for the reason that the will of the greater number of individuals, but not of all individuals, is brought to bear on public decisions. But if adopted it may well offer, without violent change, a way for the collective representation of vocational groups.

4. Citizenship should be graded. A youth of twenty-one is scarcely prepared to exercise the duties of the citizen intelligently. As long as the view prevails that the functions of the state are to be restricted to a minimum, it is perhaps not wholly absurd to admit a mere stripling to a share in the conduct of government. But the sphere of government is steadily enlarging, and its problems are becoming more and more intricate. Twenty-five would certainly be a better minimum age. Under vocational representation there is likely to be an Upper House consisting of members who have served in the Lower House. Citizens who have attained the age of twenty-five might be empowered to vote for members of the Lower House, those who have attained the age of thirty-five for members of the Upper House, but these are details upon which it is unfitting to expatiate here. The point I have in mind is that citizenship should be graded.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] _Vide_ Appendix II, on _Force and Freedom_.

[86] I use the word Organize in its spiritual sense. The empirical, animal organism is commonly taken as the type upon which the notion of organism is modeled. The animal organism, however, fails to express the implicit idea, for the following reasons: The number of members is limited; the combination of organs is, so far as we can know, accidental, and the relation is hierarchical,—there are inferior and superior organs. The spiritual conception differs in each of these points. The number of members is infinite; the relation is necessary; and they are equal, that is, of equal worth. To distinguish the spiritual pattern from the animal type the term metorganic may be used for the former, in analogy to such terms as metempirical, metaphysical, etc., and the system of ethics expounded in this volume may be called the _metorganic system of ethics_.

[87] Representation by geographical districts is the logical outcome of the individualistic conception of democracy. Where this prevails, the state is supposed to take account only of the common interests, those in respect to which all individuals are alike, such as security of life and property, those interests being ignored in respect to which the groups that constitute society, the farmers, the merchants, the industrial laborers, etc., differ. Hence any convenient number of citizens, pursuing their life purposes side by side within a certain geographical area, may serve as a constituency. The absence of regard for the real diversity, and often the clash of interests, between persons belonging to such constituencies, is due to the atomistic, individualistic notion of democracy just mentioned. But sheer individualism is everywhere on the wane, and is bound to become less and less dominant in the degree that the industrial evolution of society proceeds, and the various groups stand out distinctly as different against one another in their functions and in the conditions subservient to those functions. Society is in fact not an aggregate of human atoms. It is already an imperfect organism, destined to become more and more adequately organized. And the system of representation has got to be remodeled and adjusted to this fact and this ideal.

[88] By “interests” I understand fulfilment of the social function with which the group is charged.

[89] And, as a matter of fact, because this is so, there is no state, no democracy, in which public opinion or public sentiment actually does rule, save by fits and starts. Government is usually in the hands of more or less selfish coteries, who operate behind the scenes, who do know what they want and who, like the Piper of Hamelin, are past masters of the art of leading the political children whither they will.

[90] I am not of course discussing the merits or demerits of the protective tariff as such, but am using it as illustration. As such it will serve the purpose.

The practice of “log-rolling” may at first sight seem to resemble the proposed plan. But, in reality, the two are diametrical opposites. By “log-rolling” is meant the kind of concessions made by the shipping interests to the manufacturers by the manufacturers to the farmers, or to the workingmen when the latter happen to be strong enough to enforce their demands. Each group persists in pursuing its selfish aims; only, in order to achieve them it makes concessions to the selfishness of the others. Each follows the path into the Hades of egotism, and throws the necessary sops to Cerberus on the way. The plan outlined in the text, on the other hand, has for its object the interlocking of the various social interests, the fitting them reciprocally into one another; or better, the object is to cure each group as far as possible of its selfishness by so modifying its claims, that the granting of them shall become beneficial to the rest.