Conclusion

The best and the worst things that men do they do in the name of a religion. Some have supposed that only supernatural religion could mislead. The history of our time shows that if men no longer believe in God they will make themselves gods of Power, of Evolution, of the Race, the Nation, or the State. In the name of such gods will they drench a continent with blood, and the youth will offer themselves up as willing martyrs. There is no double dose of original sin which established this worship in Germany. It is the product of a combination of historic causes -- the long division of the people, their geographical situation, the national reaction against Napoleon, the achievement of union by military means, the fear of the Czardom, causing the acquiescence of the more pacific elements in militarism, the loss by emigration of those who would not tolerate the governing system. The idealized exaltation of the state supervened to reconcile the thinking classes and give them a creed justifying their dislike of humanitarianism. In Hegel's hands this creed had, as we have seen, its idealistic side, and events had to move before this could be shed, and the naked doctrine of Power be proclaimed by Treitschke. But the elevation of the state above men means at bottom the supremacy of Power. It is the natural creed of an aristocracy or a bureaucracy, as insistence on Personality is the natural creed of the people. Theories of politics or of conduct that live long and retain influence have something more than theory behind them. They appeal to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged classes, of Property and Order. It plays on the feat of fundamental criticism, of the razor-edge of thought, of the claim of conscience to scrutinize institutions and ordinances. It appeals to the slavishness which accepts a master if he will give the slave a share of tyranny over others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egoism and class ascendancy.

It was by no accident that the Greatest Happiness Principle took root and flourished during and after the last great war that devastated Europe. The spectacle of the massive misery caused by Governments had its recoil. Men began to test institutions and ideas of life by their effect on the felt happiness and misery of millions, and they found in the "happy fireside for weans and wife" a truer measure of a nation's greatness than stricken fields and extended territory. To that view in essence we are returning today. Much has been learnt in the interval, and a modern thinker could not regard happiness crudely as a sum of pleasures, or divorce it from the mode of life which is its substance, or judge the well-being of a whole society by the contentment of a numerical majority. But the desire to arrest the misery of mankind will revive in double strength. Europe has undergone its martyrdom, millions in the service of false gods, other millions in resisting them. It will ask itself what is the true God and where the true religion. The answer, whatever it be, must rest on this truth, that the higher ethics and the deeper religion do not come to destroy the simplest rights and duties of neighbour to neighbour, but to fulfil and extend them. Great purposes, vast schemes, haunt the imagination of man, and urge him on to achievements without which life would be relatively poor and stagnant. But too often such purposes are built on foundations of human misery and wrong. It is the rarer insight which sees in the great good the comprehensive unity of all the little things that make up the life of the common man. The theory of the state is a case in point. The state is a great organization. Its well-being is something of larger and more permanent import than that of any single citizen. Its scope is vast. Its service calls for the extreme of loyalty and self-sacrifice. All this is true. Yet when the state is set up as an entity superior and indifferent to component individuals it becomes a false god, and its worship the abomination of desolation, as seen at Ypres or on the Somme. When it is conceived as a means to the extension of our duty towards our neighbour, a means whereby we can apply effectively and on the large scale what we know to be good in the simple personal relations of life, no such discord arises. The purposes of political action are no way narrowed, but purified and humanized. We learn to think of our political conduct in terms of the vast reverberation of consequences on thousands and millions of lives, great and lowly, present and to come. We cannot, indeed, ever adequately interpret great general truths in terms of the particulars which they cover. To give to vast social issues all their human meaning is beyond the power of imagination -- an imagination which recoils even from the effort to appreciate the daily list of casualties. But the true progress of political thought lies in the cultivation of imaginative power. It insists on going back from the large generality, the sounding abstraction, the imposing institution, to the human factors which it covers. Not that it wishes to dissolve the fabric. Men must continue to build, and on deeper foundations and with larger plans. But there must be no slave buried alive beneath the corner stone. Or rather, the fabric is no building, but a tissue of living, thinking, feeling beings, of whom every one is "an end and not a means merely," and the value of the whole is marred if it requires the suffering of any single element. There is no lack of vastness in this design. It might rather be accused of vagueness, if it were not that it starts with the simple relations of man and man and bids each of us seek to realize in political conduct and through social institutions, on the widest scale and in impersonal relations, what we well understand in our private lives as "our duty towards our neighbour."

Political morality is not super-morality, setting ordinary obligations aside. It is morality extended and defined, stripped of the limitations of class or national prejudice, generalized for application in great impersonal organizations, the only thing that can save such organizations from becoming inhuman. It may be said that institutions and politics generally can do little to make individuals happy. That may be true, but they can do a vast deal to make individuals unhappy, and to cut off this great source of woe is no unworthy aim. That is why a sound political philosophy will always insist on the individual, the freedom which is his basis of self-respect, the equality which is his title to consideration, the happiness whereof "the tiny bowl is so easily spilt." It is not that our little lives are rounded in ourselves. On the contrary, if we find happiness anywhere, it is only in merging ourselves in some greater object. It is that if all objects worthy of effort may be considered as contributing to the advancement of mankind, this advancement, properly understood, goes not over the bodies and souls of individuals like a Juggernaut's car, but through their heightened activities and larger lives like a quickening spirit. Here precisely lies the issue between two views of the state. In the democratic or humanitarian view it is a means. In the metaphysical view it is an end. In the democratic view it is the servant of humanity in the double sense that it is to be judged by what it does for the lives of its members and by the part that it plays in the society of humankind. In the metaphysical view it is itself the sole guardian of moral worth. In the democratic view the sovereign state is already doomed, destined to subordination in a community of the world. In the metaphysical view it is the supreme achievement of human organization. For the truth let the present condition of Europe be witness.