NOTES
7. J. H. Bridges, Essays and Addresses, pp. 86-8.
8. In his new volume, Social and International Ideals, Dr Bosanquet advances a fresh definition of the state, which is more in line with Green's way of thinking. "I understand by the state the power which, as an organ of the community, has the function of maintaining the external conditions necessary to the best life. These conditions are called rights. They are the claims recognized by the whole of the community as the sine qua non of the highest obtainable fulfilment of the capacities for the best life possessed by its best members." This seems to carry a much fuller recognition of the individual than is usual in Dr Bosanquet's writings. If consistently pressed, it would, I think, lead to the reconstruction of his entire theory, but the chapter from which it is taken is professedly not a correction but a restatement of his theory of the state, and the criticisms on this theory in general must therefore stand unaffected.
9. Good at least from the point of view of the society. One might call it the loyal will.
10. When taken as more it will be found to be really less. If the good of the state is opposed to that of its component members, it is because its good is being found in ends which do not make life really better, for example, glory, wealth, expansion and power. Such ends the masses may serve in their capacity of "cannon-fodder," but then they are not parts of the state but mere living tools, the effective organization consisting of the rulers and generals who want the glory. At bottom, when any organized human society is alleged to have a good other than that of its members, it means a good, at least a supposed good, of some of its members without regard to the remainder. It may be said that these unhappy ones acquiesce, e. g., when the multitude lets itself be dominated by its chiefs and led by them to the slaughter in the desire to share even in a subordinate capacity in the glory of reducing other people to a still more abject subjection. This is the solution suggested in a peculiarly sinister passage in Nietzsche. If so, the people constitute themselves partners of a common good of a false and inhuman sort. So far as the illusion of service to a state standing above its members encourages such false values, it is practically mischievous as well as theoretically false. Where an organized society has a "good" opposed to the summed up gain and loss of its component members, it is either that some of those alleged members are treated merely as instruments external to the body they share or that the good is a false good, cheating even those that partake of it.
When we speak of a good we mean a good supposed to be realized in the life of society itself. So far as any society subserves ends beyond its own limits, as, e.g., a state may be said to owe, and even to perform, a service to civilization, different principles of course apply. It may be right and good for a state like Belgium to risk all in such a case, but even here there is no final distinction between the duty or well-being of Belgium and of the Belgians as Belgians.