CHAPTER SECOND.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY.-THE NATION.

§ 18. "MAN is a political animal," Aristotle tells us. His nature has not attained its perfection until he is associated with his fellows in an organized body politic. Whatever may be the historical occasion of the origin of the state, this fact of man's nature is the sufficient cause.

The first type of society is the family. This, like the state, is a natural form. It is a relationship not constituted by a reflective act of its constituent parts. No man has a choice as to whether he will or will not be born into a family, though he may by his own act cease to belong to it. Like the state, the family has a moral personality and a distinct life. It is a whole which contains more than is contained in the parts as such; that is, it is an organism, not an accretion.

§ 19. The family expanded into the tribe. Related or neighboring families held or drawn together by natural affection or neighborly good feeling, or a sense of the need of union for the common defence, but chiefly by the political needs and instincts of their nature, formed an organic whole. By the legal fiction of adoption, all were regarded as members of one family and children of the common patriarch, living or dead. The reverence for the common father whose name they bore became a hero-worship, and bound them together by religious ties. Their living head or chief was regarded as inspired with judgment to pronounce upon disputed cases, which gradually gave rise to a body of judicial rules or laws revered as of divine authority.

§ 20. The tribe became-though not always-a city. A hill-fort thrown up for defence against some sudden attack became the rallying-point and then the residence of its people. The conquest or adoption of other tribes added to their numbers and strength, and their home was enclosed by a wall capable of defence. The tribal gods or the first citizens obtained general

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recognition as the defenders of the city, but those of the newcomers were still worshipped by the clans. The first and the adopted tribes took the place of power, claiming to be "the people," and forming an aristocracy who possessed exclusive knowledge of the laws and religion of the city. Only after prolonged struggle were these published in a code, and places of responsibility opened to the new citizens or plebs.

§ 21. By the conquest of other cities, the city in some cases attained an imperial rank. In other cases a number of cities freely united in a league of offence and defence, and ceded their power to make war to a central congress, and established a common treasury. Both movements are in the direction of the nation, the complete form of the state, as the tribe and the city are incomplete forms. The nation is scarcely found in ancient history, save perhaps among the Jews and the Egyptians, and even among them the tribal divisions perpetuated themselves within the national unity.

§ 22. The nation in its true form first appears in the kingdoms founded in Western Europe by the Teutonic tribes, after the destruction of the Roman Empire. The Teuton hated cities and loved the open country. When he spared a city he generally left it to its old occupants and made them his tributaries. He divided the open country into marks or communes, whose occupants were actually or by adoption members of one family-clan and bore the same name. Several of these were gathered by force of the political instinct into "hundreds," hundreds into "shires," and shires into kingdoms. Over each of these subdivisions an elder, alderman or chief presided. In this way the race passed from the tribal to the national constitution, without developing the vigorous municipal life that had previously thwarted all attempts at establishing any larger body politic than the city, except a military, imperial despotism.

Within the Teutonic mark towns grew up by the same process as in the ancient world, and the antipathy of the race to the town life wore off. But before these new municipalities were powerful enough to hinder the national growth, the nation

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had become an established fact. A second enemy of the national unity was the feudal system, which conferred large powers upon the local barons, in countries that had been conquered rather than occupied. Everywhere save in Germany itself the joint efforts of the king and the people overthrew this local power, and made the central government supreme. Thus the national consciousness superseded all other political attach

ments.

§ 23. The nation is the normal type of the modern state, as the city was that of ancient society, and the tribe that of the prehistoric times. Besides many inaccurate definitions of its nature, several that deserve our notice have been given from different stand-points.

(1) Geographically the nation is a people speaking one language, living under one government, and occupying a continuous area. This area is a district whose natural boundaries designate it as intended for the site of an independent people.

No one point of this definition is essential, save the second.

(2) Politically the nation is an organization of the whole people for the purposes of mutual defence from outside interference and of doing justice among themselves. It is a people who will to be one" in a body politic, for the purpose of realizing and making positive those natural rights which inhere in

man's nature.

(3) Ethically the nation is a moral personality vested with responsibility and authority, and endowed with a life peculiar to itself, i. e., not possessed by the parts as individuals.

§ 24. All these notions, and others besides, are elements of the historical conception of the nation. The historical nation is an organism, a political body animated by a life of its own. It embraces not one generation but many, the dead and the unborn as well as the living. It contemplates its own perpetuity, making self-preservation the first law, and being incapable of providing for its own death or dissolution. There is in its own nature no reason why it should ever cease to exist, and the analogies often drawn from the life and death of the individual man are fallacious. The end of the nation is its own perfection; towards

THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE STATE.

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that it tends by a continual progress to a larger and freer life. Thus in its laws it continually aims to make political rights more and more the realization of natural right. In its gradual or sudden modifications of the form of government, it tends to make it more and more the exponent of the wants and the powers of the governed. Industrially it continually aims to develop the resources of its soil and the activities of its people, until they become in all necessary things independent and selfsufficient.

§ 25. The nation as a moral personality must have had the same ultimate origin as other moral personalities, whether we conceive of it as the direct creation of God or as the work of His creatures. The traditions of all ancient cities with which we are acquainted, point to the first of these alternatives, that is, to a divine origin of their unity and their laws; and no one who believes in the continual government of the world by the Divine Will can doubt that nations exist in consequence of that will. "He setteth the solitary in families. . . He fixeth the bounds of the nations." Then national laws are authoritative because they set forth that Will, though its agency be concealed by reason of its working through and by the will of man. Hence the right of the nation over the lives and persons, as well as the possessions, of its members. It has a delegated authority from the Giver of life.

...

§ 26. The state is either the creature of God, with authority limited because delegated, or is an uncreated entity with authority unlimited because original. In the latter case it can confess none of its acts to be wrongful, since it owns no law or morality above or beyond its own will. It must punish all appeals to "the higher law as treasonable. The atheistic theory of the state thus necessarily leads to the despot's construction of its powers. Those who hold it have generally been in modern times, by a happy inconsistency, on the liberal side in politics, but when they attain to power, the logic of their position must lead them on to despotic measures. The only lasting and inviolable guarantee of personal freedom is in the doctrine of the state's divine origin and authority, though even this doctrine may be

abused to serve the purpose of despots, when the state is conceived as constructed ab extra by the imposition of a government by a divine authority from without. But the doctrine of the Old Testament is that the state is constituted through the people themselves being drawn into national unity, and that the government is the result and exponent of this fact. The governor, as the word originally signified, is the steersman of the vessel, giving direction to its course. But it is not his function to furnish the moving force of the ship of state. That is furnished by the vital force of the whole body politic.

§ 27. As God made the state, he had a purpose in making it, a purpose which includes some elements common to all states and others that are peculiar to the particular state. Each state, like each man, has a calling, a vocation. Every nation is an elect or chosen people. It has a peculiar part to play in the moral order of the world. When it recognises this purpose, it is, in Hebrew phrase, a people in covenant with God. The leading purpose of the Old Testament is to set forth the manner of such a national life, and the moral laws that govern it. It gives the essential features of such a life, in connection with some that are peculiar to the Jewish nation.

§ 28. The universal element in the vocation of a state is expressed in the statement that it is the institution of rights. This differentiates it from the family, which is the institution of the affections; also from mankind at large, as rights are realized and made positive through the existence of the state. Justice or Righteousness, Plato discovered, is of the essence of the state. It can therefore attain to the purpose of its vocation only by complying with the ideal of justice as apprehended by the national conscience,―an ideal ever advancing in clearness and completeness as the nation tries to realize it. At the first this ideal requires only the righteous treatment of its own citizens as alone invested with the rights it recognises. Afterwards men are brought by analogy to feel that as the state judges between man and man, God is judging between nation and nation. Hence originates a body of law between the nations.