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THE DEVELOPMENT 
 OF THE STATE 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 GEORGE WYNDHAM M.P. 
 
 LONDON 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE ^ CO. LTD. 
 i6 JAMES STREET HAYMARKET 
 / 1904 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 263261 
 
" Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque .'''' — Ennius. 
 
 " Hcec est in gremium victos quce sola recepit . . . 
 Matris non domin^'^lritu, civesque vocavit 
 Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit. 
 Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes 
 Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes ; 
 Quod sedem mutare licet. . . . " — Claudian. 
 
 "... major rerum mihi nascitur ordo ; 
 Majus opus moveo.''^ — Virgil. 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT 
 OF THE STATE 
 
 Being an Address delivered to the 
 
 Students of the University of 
 
 Glasgow, November 1904 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 GEORGE WYNDHAM M.P 
 
 LONDON 
 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE i^ CO. Ltd. 
 16 JAMES STREET HAYMARKET 
 1904 
 
Butler & Tanner, 
 
 THE Sblwood Printing Works, 
 
 FROME, AND London. 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
 THE STATE 
 
 Gentlemen, 
 
 A man whose life is mortgaged to Party 
 politics addressing men whose lives are devoted 
 to learning must avoid political controversy and 
 may well shrink from intrusion within the pre- 
 cincts of Literature, Philosophy, Esthetics 
 and Science. I hail these high themes with 
 instinctive reverence, but with rational modesty 
 I say to them '* Fare ye well ! " I am a public 
 servant in the conduct of affairs. You are, or 
 mean to be. Masters of the Arts. Neither region 
 is familiar to us both ; yet the Lord Rector and 
 the members of one University are one family, 
 and he, chosen by them, should elect some 
 
2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 common orround for his Address. I dismiss the 
 popular subterfuge of Education and, since you 
 are philosophers and I am a politician, propose 
 to you a discourse on one branch of the Philo- 
 sophy of Politics, rather, I might say, on 
 the parent stem stripped of ramification and 
 foliage. My subject is remote, and dis- 
 tinct, from transitory contentions usually sug- 
 gested by the word '* Politics." These 
 controversies are, of course, important in 
 their way and for our time. I do not 
 undervalue their moment. Yet, by comparison 
 with Politics in the simpler sense of that 
 word, they seem, even to me, a politician, but 
 little more than a stage play of which the 
 interest centres not so much on the plot and 
 the characters as on their exits and their 
 entrances. That is the end of my exordium. 
 Without further ado I name my subject '' The 
 Development of the State." 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 3 
 
 The Development of the State affords us 
 common ground. It is a theme at once prac- 
 tical and philosophic, but neither transcen- 
 dental nor of To-day. So, turning my back on 
 the Halls of Westminster and the plantations 
 of Academus, I seek the alleys of the Lyceum 
 and find a convenient point of departure for my 
 peripatetics in the saying of Aristotle : — '' Man 
 is by nature a political animal " ; a living being 
 that can prosper only in an organized society. 
 
 His saying is trite, but still pregnant. Two 
 questions leap from it clamouring for defini- 
 tion : ^'What sort of man?" ''What sort of 
 State ? " An unguarded answer to the first ques- 
 tion might land me into Metaphysics or Biology. 
 Fortunately Aristotle's sentence — and that is 
 my text — excludes isolated men. It deals with 
 man only in relation to the State and declares 
 that the nature of his being consists in that 
 relation. The context goes on to say that any 
 
4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 man outside that relation must be either a God 
 or a beast. Isolated men, whether God-like or 
 beastly, are akin to the hermit-crab. They 
 occupy, without ceremony or concern, shells, 
 accidentally convenient to them, but congeni- 
 tally evolved by others. The sage and the 
 felon are, politically, cuckoos. I would also 
 exclude abstract Man, that nebulous imperson- 
 ality of metaphysical anthropologists. 
 
 I dismiss Rousseau's abstract Man, the 
 imaginary creation of eighteenth century dog- 
 matism, with his equally imaginary Rights. 
 The State demands real men who owe to it 
 real duties. I dismiss the composite concep- 
 tion based, partly on the Germania of Tacitus, 
 and partly on recent studies of aboriginal 
 tribes. After these must follow the latest ab- 
 stract Man, Darwin's Man, ** probably arboreal 
 in his origin." A brilliant speculation put for- 
 ward from this chair by one of its most 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 5 
 
 illustrious occupants has, indeed, invested meta- 
 physico-biological Man with vivid interest. 
 I refer to Mr. Balfour's striking theory 
 that, to adopt his phrase, the process of 
 "physiological accumulation" by which Man 
 acquired his existing mental and bodily equip- 
 ment was in all probability completed by the 
 stress of conflict during a savage prime. I 
 refer to that theory solely to make it even 
 more plain that I am dealing, not with 
 the Evolution of Man, but with the Develop- 
 ment of the State, in which men ' live and 
 move and have their being.' Men who by 
 nature are functional parts of a political organ- 
 ism must be the men we know ; historic and 
 humanistic men, recorded in annals or revealed 
 by literature and legend. 
 
 Having excluded isolated men and abstract 
 Man, I come to the second question, *'What 
 sort of State?" What is, what ought to be, 
 
6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 what might be that type of Polity to which men 
 should owe duties during their lives and for 
 which they must, if need be, lay down their 
 lives ? The saying of Aristotle excludes the 
 cosmopolitan ideal, and, again, I welcome the 
 exclusion. To do Rousseau justice, even he 
 bids us distrust those cosmopolitans who set 
 out to seek at a distance in their books duties 
 which they disdain to fulfil about them. Do I 
 err in dismissing curtly from a philosophic dis- 
 course an ideal, acclaimed by Tennyson : — 
 
 " The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World," — 
 
 and ascribed by Plutarch to Socrates ? These 
 are great names to conjure with. But the 
 formation of a judgment on the value of an 
 ideal may often be assisted if we will note the 
 date and the authorship of the phrase struck to 
 convey that ideal. The phrase — " A Citizen 
 of the World " — is not found in literature until 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 7 
 
 centuries after Aristotle. It is coined by Philo 
 Judseus or by Plutarch in the first century of our 
 era, and it is reminted, say a hundred years later, 
 by Diogenes Laertius, and Lucian. We owe 
 it to three Greeks and a Jew who, being aliens 
 by origin, wrote within the Roman Empire long 
 after the polities constructed by their own nations 
 had been overthrown. Considering the date 
 and circumstances of this word's appearance in 
 literature I am not restrained from saying that a 
 cosmopolitan world is not a polity, and cannot 
 inspire the love or exact the allegiance of men 
 who, by nature, must be members of an organic 
 State. Philo, the Jew, was intent on recon- 
 ciling the Mosaic books with Greek philosophy. 
 Plutarch, as I said, ascribes the phrase to 
 Socrates, but — and mark the significance — in an 
 essay on Banishment. Plutarch was essentially 
 a Greek lecturer, who sought his audience in 
 Flavian Rome. Diogenes Laertius, writing 
 
8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 the lives of Greek philosophers, fathers the 
 phrase on Diogenes, the cynic, who, if he used 
 it, did so apparently on the ground that he cared 
 nothing for the country in which he lived, 
 nor indeed for anything else. Lucian, deriding 
 these same philosophers in his ^ ^^<://<^;^ of Lives, 
 gives it a like attribution. He, a Greek, who 
 scoffed at the inestimable gift of his own race to 
 mankind, accepted a small administrative post in 
 Egypt from the Roman Emperor Commodus. 
 
 These three Greeks and one Jew were 
 great men of letters ; but men who, having 
 despaired of their nationalities, acquiesced in the 
 Roman Empire without caring for its fortunes ; 
 and that Empire, because of its tendency to a 
 cosmopolitanism, which they applauded, fell, 
 two centuries later, the emasculated prey of 
 virile races, still in the earliest stage of political 
 development. 
 
 Nor am I shaken when the phrase recurs 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 9 
 
 in Montaigne's essays. He stood aloof from 
 the civil and religious distractions of his own 
 country, France. It turns up once more in 
 Thomas Pain's Rights of Man, and repeatedly 
 in the prospectus and motto of Garrison's Public 
 Liberator, But it leaves me unmoved. The 
 political surroundings and philosophic pre- 
 occupations of all who employed the phrase and 
 belauded the cosmopolitan ideal confirm my 
 belief that aspiration towards that ideal saps the 
 vigour of citizenship and arrests the Development 
 of the State. The race, the nation, even the 
 Empire, in so far as we have been able to frame 
 a true political conception of that yet more 
 comprehensive organism, may each and all be 
 considered embryonic : fore-runners, and, in 
 some degree, fore-tellers, of an ideal polity that 
 may come into being and should be brought to 
 birth. But cosmopolitanism is not embryonic : 
 it is abortive. It serves only to sacrifice this 
 
lo THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 or that political beginning by anticipating the 
 image of an universal political end. To study 
 the Development of the State in terms of 
 isolated men would be futile. They may 
 stand, in the philosophy of Politics, for the 
 assumed primordial star-dust in the science of 
 Astronomy. They are the stuff out of which 
 the primitive State evolved its first stage of 
 development. But to study the State's further 
 development in terms of cosmopolitanism would 
 be absurd. As well might Astronomers, 
 forsaking research, resign themselves to a 
 placid contemplation of that predicted period 
 in which, the dead moon having retraced her 
 spiral to a frozen earth, and the planets having 
 returned to an extinguished sun, the whole 
 solar system shall drift inert through the 
 night of space towards the dark resultant of 
 a like catastrophe. That plausible, if not 
 exhilarating, sidereal hypothesis spells death to 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE ii 
 
 our planet and to the life which it supports. 
 Cosmopolitanism spells death to the State and 
 to the virtues of citizenship. 
 
 What, then, is the middle term between 
 primordial individualism and abortive cosmo- 
 politanism ? What should be that type of 
 State to which each citizen can pay a living 
 allegiance without umbrage to the renown of 
 his dead ancestors, or offence to the pride 
 taken, as legitimately, by fellow-citizens in 
 racial origins alien from his own ? The State 
 must be large enough in contour to fire the 
 imagination of all its citizens with faith in 
 the future ; yet to each citizen it must be so 
 near in detail as to evoke piety towards 
 the memorial past. The ideal State, the State 
 that is to be, must have one grandeur of 
 political design illuminated by diverse glories 
 of race achievement. 
 
II 
 
 An attempt to frame a conception of the ideal 
 State or, as I would rather put it, to foresee 
 the next stage in the State's organic evolution, 
 is beset by two difficulties. In the first place, 
 those who have written philosophically on the 
 ideal State have had consciously in their minds, 
 or subconsciously, at the back of their heads 
 as we say, the concrete facts of the particular 
 polity in which they lived and of others around 
 it. And our own minds are in like manner 
 preoccupied. Even from the philosophy of 
 Politics there is no complete escape into pure 
 abstraction. I cannot speak, nor can you listen 
 to, this Address without some thought of 
 Scotland's past and the Empire's future. 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 13 
 
 For example, Aristotle's ideal State is, as it 
 happens, the Greek iioXig : broadly, a machine 
 for making the highest life possible to a few 
 thousand persons, the citizens, but not to their 
 slaves, nor even to their wives. And we feel 
 that he writes under the shadow of a nascent 
 Macedonian Empire. Through .Dante's verse 
 there throbs an echo of the conflict between the 
 two great constructive ideals of the Middle 
 Age, neither of which was realized. Amid 
 much else of eternal beauty we find him backing 
 a Ghibelline Empire against a Guelph Papacy. 
 De Boulainvilliers openly deplores the abolition 
 of feudalism. Hobbes is vividly aware of the 
 recent decapitation of his King. Their specu- 
 lations are engrossed by concrete facts of the 
 fleeting Present. 
 
 The second difficulty is inherent in the 
 terms which they employed, and which we 
 must employ, for lack of better. Any attempt 
 
14 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 at divining an ideal type of the State to be 
 evolved in the Future can never be more, or 
 other, than a visionary presentment of the 
 more hopeful features exhibited by the actual 
 State in the Present. And in making that 
 attempt we are restricted to existing terms. But 
 faint reflections of the vanished Past loom 
 in these terms. Our thoughts are clogged by 
 what is : the words through which we seek to 
 convey our thoughts are blurred by what has 
 been. We are deafened by the domination of 
 the Present ; we are also baftied by jangling 
 discords from the Past. 
 
 We must — to take at random a handful 
 of political phrases — speak of Citizenship, of 
 Patriotism, of the rights of Nations, the destiny 
 of the Race, the ideal of Empire. 
 
 These terms are not the exact terms of 
 science, constructed — to the despair of philolo- 
 gists — out of one, or even two dead languages, 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 15 
 
 and so constructed for the precise purpose of 
 defining a new idea sharply from old ideas 
 which have prevailed and are to be discarded. 
 
 The terms in which we must discuss the 
 Development of the State are words, not labels ; 
 and, in common with all words, have a story 
 imbedded in them. Their etymology bears the 
 impress of earlier phases in the evolution of the 
 State. Bearing that impress they become, as 
 the evolution proceeds, inadequate or incon- 
 venient for a description of the next phase that 
 is cominor into beinof. 
 
 If I say: ''The Highlanders died for their 
 country at Magersfontein," I speak a great 
 truth. But the words do not fit the full inten- 
 sion and extension of that supreme sacrifice 
 to public duty paid, as it was, more than six 
 thousand miles from their native land by men 
 fighting side by side with fellow-citizens drawn 
 from every quarter of the globe. The word 
 
1 6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 ** country" does not fit the fact like a glove. It 
 cramps it like a glove with too few fingers. 
 
 The relative inadequacy of words which 
 have grown, by comparison with scientific terms, 
 which have been expressly constructed, has, 
 I believe, a compensating advantage. Their 
 etymology betrays what they once meant. And 
 to contrast that which they now mean with that 
 which they once meant may be helpful. The 
 words in which we speak of the State may reveal 
 the evolution of the State in the past, as fossils 
 assist in reproducing pictures of earlier geo- 
 logical epochs. I propose, then, to take the 
 common words which we use, without premedi- 
 tation, when discussing the broader aspects of 
 Politics, and to subject them to two tests. First, 
 pursuing an etymological method, I shall seek 
 to discover what they once meant ; and, secondly, 
 pursuing a literary method, I shall seek to dis- 
 cover when, and, if possible, why, they assumed 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 17 
 
 a modern meaning which differs from their 
 original meaning. 
 
 Throughout this enquiry I shall reserve 
 the word ''State" for general application to 
 any form of polity. It is convenient for that 
 purpose because it is less impregnated with 
 etymological colour, and, consequently, less sur- 
 charged with pristine connotations than are the 
 other words usually employed. Of these, two, 
 the Greek nox*? and the Latin popuhcs, from 
 which many modern terms are derived, suggest 
 etymologically no more than the idea of mul- 
 titude. Originally they must have come into 
 beinp; when the mere fact of a number of 
 people living together was in itself remark- 
 able. 
 
 The remainder fall into two groups. They 
 are, in respect of their etymological roots, either 
 place-words, or race-words. The roots from 
 which they spring and flourish mean, for the 
 
1 8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 first group, a comparatively small area of fixed 
 abode ; for the second, the comparatively few 
 persons undoubtedly descended from a common 
 ancestor : that and no more. 
 
 Taking first the group of etymological place- 
 words, our word '* citizen " comes from the Latin 
 civis, whose import ultimately expanded to proud 
 proportions in the Imperial claim, '' civis 
 Romanus sum." But civis springs from a 
 root which means no more than to abide. Ety- 
 mologically it recalls a primeval distinction 
 between the man attached to the, presumably, 
 conquered soil, and the nomad of no fixed abode. 
 Our word coimtry means now much more than 
 the French word conti^ee, from which it was 
 taken, and that word traces back through 
 Romance languages to the Low Latin contrata, 
 based on contra, opposite. Its original meant, 
 long ago, that which is opposite, the prospect, 
 and so, at first, a limited space of permanent 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 19 
 
 residence. It offers an exact analogy io gegend, 
 the German for country, from gegeii, opposite. 
 The French word /^^jyi' was poHtically important 
 in mediaeval and feudal literature. Etymo- 
 logically it refers back to a place with boundaries 
 and, probably, to no more than the reservation 
 for a tribe. Land, in such compound words as 
 Scotland or England, is now an important 
 political term. We speak of fighting for our 
 native land and think of these. Yet it seems 
 almost certain that the English word land 
 originally meant that which the French word 
 lande still means, namely, an open space bearing 
 a sparse spontaneous growth. The Engles, 
 who, instead of any other among her many in- 
 vaders, gave England her name, came from just 
 such narrow and impoverished districts. The 
 word land suggests that the first fixed habitations 
 must have been on natural open spaces occurring 
 only where the soil was too poor to support 
 
20 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 primeval forests. And that meaning seems to 
 persist in the lines of Shakespeare : — 
 
 "Under this thick-grown brake we'll hide ourselves 
 For through this laund anon the deer will come." 
 
 When subjected to etymological analysis the 
 political terms citizen, land (as in Scotland or 
 England), pays, country, reveal, in the earliest 
 type of the State, a dominating idea of fixed 
 abode. At that primitive stage in the State's 
 development they connoted no more than the 
 stockaded hill ; the natural glade, or heath, or 
 down ; the reservation for a tribe not wholly 
 assimilated in a polity occupying a comparatively 
 larger area ; or the home district of a clan. The 
 dominating idea of attachment to a fixed abode 
 persists through later and successive expansions 
 in the applicability of these words, and of their 
 derivatives, to wider and wider areas. But since 
 these words, and words derived from, or akin 
 to, them, do become continuously applicable to 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 21 
 
 wider and wider areas until, in some cases, they 
 at length denote the vast habitats of modern 
 nations, there is revealed a continuous trend 
 towards complex political aggregation. 
 
 Let me now examine the group of etymo- 
 lomcal Race-words. ''Race" itself, derived 
 from or akin to the High German Reiza, once 
 meant no more than common lineage ; scarcely 
 more than a family whose blood-relationship, 
 however large the family might have become, 
 was not a political fiction but a fact attested of 
 living memory. I touch on the Latin '' Gens'' 
 only to say that it meant the same thing, originally, 
 as the Teutonic Race, and to insist, for a 
 moment, on its interesting relation to another 
 Latin word, Natio, Natio, from which we get to- 
 day so many loud words that figure so largely 
 in modern politics — nation, nationality, national- 
 ism — bore in Latin a more restricted meaning 
 than even Geits, which has no modern political 
 
22 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 significance. Gejis originally connoted clan 
 sentiment and patrician pride. Natio in classical 
 Latin meant much less, and was applied, by 
 Cicero for example, almost as a term of contempt 
 to distant and barbarous peoples with whom the 
 Romanae Gentes, unforeseeing the future, sup- 
 posed that they had, and would have, but little 
 concern. 
 
 Lastly, I cite the French word ''patrie,'' from 
 the Latin patria and pater. It, also, connoted 
 originally no more than the idea of descent from 
 one man, and yet, to-day, patriotism is the word 
 we must perforce employ to describe that noble 
 sentiment which impelled Highlander and 
 Lowlander, the descendants whether of Gael, 
 or Briton, Jute, Engle, Saxon, Osterling, Dane, 
 Norman, Angevin, Huguenot, Flamand, or 
 Palatine, to fight beneath the Southern Cross, 
 side by side with Canadians — of English, Scotch, 
 and French extraction — and Australians and 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 23 
 
 South Africans, for a political ideal which can 
 hardly be stated in existing political terminology. 
 
 The dominating idea suggested etymologi- 
 cally by the group of race-words is of common 
 lineage. But they, too, reveal a continuous trend 
 towards complex political aggregation in the 
 course of which consanguinity became more and 
 more a political fiction, not, as I shall show, 
 unattended with danger to the Development of 
 the State. 
 
 Having subjected these words to etymo- 
 logical analysis, I now apply my second, literary, 
 test. From their original meanings I take a 
 jump, over centuries, to the time when they 
 assumed the meanings which they now bear. It 
 will assist our consideration of the Development 
 of the State to discover when the word country 
 became applicable to, say, France or Scodand ; 
 when the word station, in despite of its contemp- 
 tuous use in Latin, became applicable to the 
 
24 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 Scots and the French ; and when the word 
 patrioiism became appHcable to the love of 
 such nations for their countries. If we can dis- 
 cover when they assumed their present poHtical 
 meanings, we may be able to guess why they 
 assumed them. It is possible, if not to prove, at 
 least to establish a presumption, that the meaning 
 of these three words — cotmtry, nation, patriotism 
 — did not expand to their present significance 
 before the sixteenth century. 
 
 The English word coM7itry is taken from the 
 French word contr(^e. Contrive has never meant 
 in French, and does not even now mean, a 
 political country such as France. It still means 
 a country-side or comparatively small physio- 
 graphical area. Throughout the Middle Age 
 contree meant a smaller area than pays, and 
 pays itself had not become applicable to 
 France. Pays described the provincial native 
 land from which a feudal lord led to war his 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 25 
 
 Bretons, or Burgundians, or Angevins. It 
 meant no more than a district to which men 
 were attached by feudal, or clan sentiment. 
 The narrower sense remains in such phrases 
 as, for example, the familiar Vin dti pays, just 
 as the English word country, concurrently with 
 the wider significance to which its meaning has 
 expanded, still retains an earlier and narrower 
 sense in such phrases as the North country or 
 the West country. But the French worA pays 
 was almost supplanted by the word '' patrie'' at 
 a time when it was still restricted to the nar- 
 rower provincial meaning. 
 
 Now — and here I can clinch the argument 
 — we know, through the accident of an erudite 
 conflict, exactly when the word patrie appears 
 in French literature to the prejudice, as it 
 turned out, of further expansion in the political 
 meaning of pays. The word patrie is used 
 by the French poet and man of letters, Joachim 
 
26 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 du Bellay, in the earliest years of the second 
 half of the sixteenth century — just after 1550. 
 He was deliberately intent on purifying and 
 enriching his native tongue, and to that end 
 published a famous pamphlet called The 
 Defence and Illustration of the French Lan- 
 guage. But a contemporary man of letters, 
 Charles Fontaine, trounces du Bellay soundly, 
 after the manner of contemporary men of letters, 
 for introducing, in patrie, an unnecessary 
 neologism. "The Man," he writes, "who can 
 use the word pays has no use for the 
 word patrie!' De Baif, one of du Bellay's col- 
 leagues in the literary movement of the poets 
 who called themselves " La Pleifade," returns to 
 the charge, declaring that ''patrie' is a beautiful 
 word. The battle rages, and accidentally gives 
 a date to the acclimatisation of the word 
 ''patrie'' in France. My point is that later 
 than 1550 both du Bellay, who substituted 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 27 
 
 patrie for pays, and Fontaine, who took him 
 to task for the substitution, meant, and meant 
 only, by either word the province in which a 
 man ivas born. There is no hint of either 
 word being usually applicable to the whole of 
 France, or of either word being tinged with 
 the modern idea of nationality. Afterwards, 
 no doubt, patrie became in French the 
 right word for France, as co^tntry became in 
 English the right word for England or Scot- 
 land, but it was after and not before the year 
 
 1550. 
 
 And so, too, with the French word ''nation!' 
 Throughout the Middle Age, and notably in 
 the fifteenth century, Froissartand Mathieu de 
 Couci use the word ''nation' — natio7i — in the 
 sense which, I suppose, it originally bore in our 
 University of Glasgow, where recently three out 
 of four nations conferred the high honour which 
 elicits this humble address. Froissart writes of 
 
2 8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 " all kinds of people who were not of the 
 nation of London," that is, who were not born 
 in London. De Couci, in his History of 
 Charles VIII, tells us that ''the town of 
 Bruges had, for so long that the memory of 
 man went not to the contrary, been frequented 
 by merchants who were strangers." He adds 
 that these merchants were called "the Nations." 
 I conclude that the three words which I 
 selected— -^^^/;^/r|/, nation, patriotism — only began 
 to assume their modern political and national 
 import in the sixteenth century. That is when 
 they assumed it. Can we guess why they did 
 so ? The answer is, I believe, simply that 
 the political entities and the political sentiment, 
 now designated by those words, were at the 
 beginning of that century of too recent a 
 creation to have changed the meaning of 
 everyday speech. The meaning of language 
 alters, of course, after, and not before, changes 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 29 
 
 have been effected in the things which it de- 
 scribes. 
 
 This consideration, first of the etymologi- 
 cal origin of the words in which we must 
 discuss the Development of the State, and, 
 secondly, of the date at which they assumed 
 their modern meanings, may serve to bring out 
 into higher relief certain features in that Develop- 
 ment with which we are all, no doubt, familiar, 
 but which we sometimes overlook. These 
 words reveal two dominating ideas, of attach- 
 ment to a fixed abode, and of real or fancied 
 consanguinity, in every type of the State con- 
 structed in the past by the political animal in 
 obedience to the dictates of his nature. Further, 
 they reveal a continuous trend towards a com- 
 plex political aggregation swayed, it may be, 
 during this, or that, period more by one than 
 by the other of those ideas : but always em- 
 bracinof both. 
 
Ill 
 
 I DO not, of course, suggest that the Develop- 
 ment of the State has proceeded without breach 
 of continuity. History refutes that by the col- 
 lapse of the Roman Empire and, again, by the 
 failure to construct Christendom, as a polity, 
 out of feudalism. The fall of the Roman 
 Empire before inroads of races in the fifth 
 century ; the fabrication of modern powers from 
 the ruins of feudalism in the fifteenth and six- 
 teenth centuries mark the close of two out of 
 the three epochs into which Western history can 
 for convenience be divided. And, now, after four 
 centuries of the third epoch, the Nation-States, 
 or European Powers, fabricated at its com- 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 31 
 
 mencement, find themselves face to face with, 
 as It seems, the coming into being of a new, 
 a larger, and an even more complex, type of the 
 State. Can that be brought to birth ? Can a 
 third breach of continuity in development be 
 evaded by polities which include in their 
 populations many races and hold sway over 
 territories separated by oceans ? If we are on 
 the eve of a further stage in the Development 
 of the State which may, in after-times, be held 
 to mark a fourth epoch in history, it is proper 
 to consider the features, or forces, which have 
 appeared in every preceding type of the State. 
 
 The future is a darkness impenetrable to 
 man. We must search our way into it step by 
 step. If we are not to stumble, each step must 
 be illumined. But there is no light save from 
 the past, and, from the past, we must fetch 
 light, if only in lanterns. 
 
 We find in every preceding type of the 
 
32 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 State two dominating ideas ; first, the senti- 
 ment of consanguinity or pride in Race, and, 
 secondly, attachment to a fixed abode evinced, 
 almost always, by a population of diverse 
 race extraction. These two ideas are not 
 easily harmonized. We find, also, a continuous 
 trend towards complex political aggregation, 
 so constant as almost to argue a force of 
 human nature which might be called Political 
 Gravitation. But to that force one, or other, 
 more often both, of the dominant ideas are in 
 some measure refractory. Can we assist in 
 directing a continuous development by avoid- 
 ing known aberrations which have, so history 
 teaches, occasioned breaches in continuity ? 
 Success in such an enterprise must, I submit, 
 depend, in the first place, on a frank recognition 
 of these three features, or forces. We must 
 count on their persistence. In the light of that 
 recognition we may seek a wholesome, instead 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 33 
 
 of an unwholesome, interaction between the two 
 dominant ideas, of pride in Race and of attach- 
 ment to a particular territory. And we may, 
 again, seek so to control the force of Political 
 Gravitation as to evolve a type of the State in 
 which, however complex, by analogy with the 
 solar system, planetary polities, however huge, 
 might be swayed from a primal tendency to 
 direct collision into a choric pursuit of inter- 
 dependent orbits. 
 
IV 
 
 What are the errors of the past which we 
 should do well to shun ? Taking the first 
 epoch of Western history from the advent of 
 Aryan tribes in the lands that contain and jut 
 into the Mediterranean Sea we note chiefly the 
 persistent, if occasionally interrupted, effect of 
 Political Gravitation culminating in the Roman 
 Empire. Can we discover any evil in the 
 process of that complex political aggregation 
 which may have conduced to its doom ? I 
 venture to detect a too narrow, and therefore 
 false, insistence on the idea of Race. That 
 idea was embodied by Statesmen and sung by 
 poets almost exclusively in respect of the Gejts 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 35 
 
 Romana, of the descendants, that is, of some 
 few among many Aryan tribes. I pass over 
 the possibly consequent exaggeration of patri- 
 cian sentiment in the City of Rome and of 
 her immediate territories, though this, acci- 
 dentally, subjected the whole civilized world to 
 a political war originating in the party politics 
 of that one city. The greater evil was that the 
 legitimate pride of other races within the Empire 
 was unduly starved. Virgil, singing of ^neas 
 but also applauding the Empire of Augustus, 
 wrote in the tag we all know : — 
 
 " Tantse molis erat Romanam condere gentem." 
 
 And, in a hundred years, we have Plutarch and 
 Philo, in two hundred years, Diogenes and 
 Lucian dwelling not on the idea of Race nor 
 even on the idea of Empire, but on cosmo- 
 politanism. And, what an obvious political 
 fiction was the Roman citizenship of St. Paul ! 
 
1,6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 The insistence on a too narrow, and therefore 
 false, interpretation of the Race ideal made for 
 cosmopolitanism. It destroyed local colour 
 and feature throughout the vast extension of 
 the Empire. And this baneful tendency towards 
 cosmopolitanism was, in the absence of ade- 
 quate local attachment, still further fostered 
 by the marked development in facilities for 
 transit. The multiplication and cheapening of 
 transit, leading to the interchange of commo- 
 dities and the assimilation of traditional charac- 
 teristics, makes for wealth and convenience and, 
 perhaps, though more doubtfully, for toleration. 
 It bestows on mankind many boons of great 
 value. Yet, tradition, too, has her legacy, also 
 of great value. If the convenience and wealth 
 afforded by transit bulk too largely in the 
 esteem of individual men, they are apt to lose 
 the virility of citizenship and to become politi- 
 cally vapid citizens of the world. 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 37 
 
 The Roman Empire subsided into a drab 
 level of political uniformity, comfortable for m- 
 dividuals, but conducive to civic apathy and 
 decay. Roman statesmen and poets were 
 unaware of that decay until the advent of bar- 
 barian in-roads. Indeed, to judge from the 
 latest Latin authors, they were so drugged by 
 a narrow Race idealism, so enervated by the 
 laxity of cosmopolitanism, as to be insensible 
 of the catastrophe to their Empire until some 
 years after its foundations had, in fact, been 
 shaken to their base. 
 
 Taking the second epoch of history from 
 the time when these barbarians, our ancestors, 
 pierced into Europe and into the British Isles, 
 we see the idea of Race predominating for 
 centuries over the development of the State. 
 Not only in Scodand, but throughout these 
 Isles, throughout France and Germany, Italy 
 and Spain, we have to deal with true races. 
 
38 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 that is to say with clans. And these com- 
 paratively small human polities were influenced 
 almost wholly by the conservative force of 
 tradition at a time when transit, the levelling 
 force, was precarious. 
 
 Later, and by degrees, the idea of fixed 
 abode emerges, and you get the country, or 
 pays, in the earher and narrower sense of those 
 terms which I have sought to define. So that 
 you have a Europe of innumerable races 
 pegged down upon innumerable plots : hence 
 feudalism. 
 
 But the third feature, or force, found in 
 every stage of the State's Development, namely. 
 Political Gravitation, begins to work. The 
 papacy becomes, in Hobbes' fine phrase, '' the 
 ghost of the Roman Empire sitting on the 
 grave thereof" As against that ghostly shadow 
 of an Imperial State, Charlemagne, and many 
 another, planned the construction of a solid 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 39 
 
 Empire. Their designs are reflected, here and 
 there, in the dreams of Arthurian legend. These 
 two ideals, for all that the first was a fantasy and 
 the second a failure, were in themselves construc- 
 tive. They precipitated the conflict between the 
 Empire and the Papacy. But neither of them 
 prevailed. Nor were subsequent attempts at 
 further developments of the State attended, dur- 
 ing the Middle Age, with any lasting success. 
 The idea of race embodied in countless 
 clans was continuously stiffened as each clan, 
 ceasing to wander, became tied hard and fast 
 to a provincial area in obedience to the idea 
 of fixed abode, so that a multiplex conjunction 
 of the two ideas produced, in the chequer- 
 board of a materialized feudalism, a medium 
 too refractory for the realization of Empire. 
 The glory of Feudalism was in the Crusades ; 
 its failure, in abortive attempts at Empire ; its 
 disgrace in the 100 years' war. For in that 
 
40 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 war, and in others of like origin, the feudal 
 overlord, actuated by dynastic pride, betrayed 
 even the idea of Race without accomplishing a 
 further stage in the Development of the State. 
 Feudalism, exhausted by abortive political con- 
 struction, and dishonoured by treachery to its 
 traditional inspiration, proved too intractable to 
 the force of Political Gravitation. 
 
 In the first epoch, a narrow interpretation 
 of the Race idea exclusively in respect of one 
 race destroyed the traditions of other races and 
 so weakened the idea of local attachment. 
 Free play was given to Political Gravitation over 
 a featureless expanse, but only to produce the 
 personal comfort and political languor of cos- 
 mopolitanism. In the second epoch, the con- 
 structive results of Political Gravitation were 
 never attained. The wide diffusion of Races, 
 sporadically entrenched in a medley of fiefs, 
 presented obstacles on which that force ex- 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 41 
 
 pended its main momentum and, for the rest, 
 was deflected towards dynastic ideals unrelated 
 to any true development of the State. It was 
 then at the opening of the third epoch of history 
 that statesmen deliberately fabricated out of the 
 ruins of Feudalism, the modern Nation-States 
 of the last three or four hundred years. 
 
 And now, after those years, the fabricated 
 Nation-States, not wholly homogeneous even 
 within their European frontiers, are, in some 
 cases, notably in our own, exposed to the 
 strain of vast over-sea dependencies. They 
 are called to take up once more the arduous 
 enterprise of initiating a further stage in the 
 Development of the State, by devising yet 
 another and larger and more complex type of 
 polity. What will that type be ? To that 
 question there is, as yet, no final answer. We 
 can only say that it will not be, unless we 
 consider and shun known errors. Can we 
 
42 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 harmonize the idea of race with the idea of 
 attachment to a fixed abode and then apply 
 the stress of Political Gravitation to these 
 resultant harmonies so equably as to avoid 
 a fatal violence to either idea ? 
 
 At the beginning of the epoch of Nation- 
 States no single race was co-extensive with a 
 nation. Now, in the last decades of that 
 epoch, in but few instances does any one 
 nation occupy all the territory of a State. 
 We must count on the persistent force of 
 Political Gravitation. We must consider the 
 successive expansions of meaning in the words 
 natio, nation, nationalism, and reflect that what 
 we now call a '' nation " may not exhaust the 
 possible developments of that word's meanings. 
 But what do we now call a nation ? Of all politi- 
 cal terms that is, perhaps, the most equivocal. 
 The Poles are a nation. They speak one 
 language and, broadly, are of one race. But 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 43 
 
 they are citizens of three separate States. The 
 Swiss are a nation. They are the citizens of one 
 State, but they speak at least three languages, 
 French, German, and Italian ; they are de- 
 scended from three Aryan stocks, and probably, 
 if we accept the most recent conclusions of 
 Ethnology, also, and in a large degree, from 
 a widely alien non-Aryan broad-headed race 
 which Professor Ripley calls Alpine, and detects 
 by head-measurements in other mountainous 
 regions of Western Europe. Yet political writers 
 who deplore the partition of Poland because 
 of the Poles' identity of race and language 
 acclaim the nationality of the Swiss despite of 
 diversity in their speech and origin. Mr. Her- 
 bert Paul, in a luminous *' introductory memoir" 
 prefixed to the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary 
 Gladstone, gives Lord Acton's view of Nation- 
 alism. * By '' Nationalism" Lord Acton meant, 
 as he explains, '*the complete and consistent 
 
44 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 theory that the State and the nation must be co- 
 extensive.'" Assent and dissent are aHke imper- 
 tinent in the absence of agreement on the meaning 
 of the word " nation." The just use of that word 
 seems a matter rather of feeling than of thought. 
 The French, thanks to the exertions of Kings 
 and Statesmen, have for centuries been a nation, 
 thouo-h the Franks were but one Teutonic clan. 
 Italy, partly through the influence of political 
 writers, has recently become a State co-extensive 
 with a nation. On the other hand, the United 
 Kingdom is not co-extensive with our State, 
 and no one nation is co-extensive even with the 
 limits of the United Kingdom. You, the Scots, 
 are a nation : the United Kingdom includes 
 but a fraction of the State's territory. With 
 such a choice before us we cannot accept the 
 static resultant of Political Gravitation in a par- 
 ticular place and at a particular time as a 
 permanent index to political truth. Political 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 45 
 
 Gravitation is dynamic. The Western State, 
 once embodied in a wandering tribe, or a 
 Greek city, has developed under the stress of 
 that force into, say, the German Empire or 
 the United States of America. We could, of 
 course, use the word nation as a synonym for 
 the citizens of any State at any stage of develop- 
 ment. But, then, it would cease to suggest what 
 most people mean when they speak of Nation- 
 ality. Let us, by all means, revere Nationality ; 
 but Nationality conscious of Race diversity 
 in its origin and aspiring towards a yet 
 more comprehensive ideal but imperfectly 
 realized in the Empire as it is. The senti- 
 ment of Nationality, however lofty, has, in 
 common with every human sentiment, the 
 defects of its qualities. It may harden into 
 Nationalism and oppose obstacles to the further 
 Development of the State. Yet it is not, on 
 that account, to be lightly rejected. Any nation, 
 
46 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 and therefore every nation within the State, 
 needs character, if only to redeem the State from a 
 featureless cosmopolitanism. Character implies 
 legitimate pride. Pride can only be based on the 
 past, and pride in the past is a political virtue. 
 I would, however, advance a view which 
 is not, I believe, paradoxical, though pos- 
 sibly it may court challenge. It is that, for 
 the purpose of assisting the development of the 
 State, pride of Race, provided the facts of Race 
 be studied and understood, is a better, and a 
 sounder, incentive than pride of Nationality. 
 Pride of Race is a better incentive, because it 
 refers back to a remoter and so, for the pur- 
 poses of pride, more honourable past. It is a 
 sounder incentive because it refers with closer 
 accuracy to the earlier and more spontaneous 
 Developments of the State. Nationality, how- 
 ever venerable in itself, seems, by compari- 
 son with our long descent from many Aryan 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 47 
 
 clans, a political device of relatively recent in- 
 vention. We are nearer to the truth, though 
 farther from the present, if, putting Nationality 
 with all due observance and regard in the 
 second place, we found our political self-esteem 
 chiefly on lineage from one or more of those 
 flashing waves of Ar3^an onset which reached 
 our shores in succession during many centuries. 
 When the absorbing problems of Race shall 
 have received the profound study which they 
 demand from adepts in the old humanistic arts 
 of History and Literature, and in the new 
 humanistic sciences of Ethnology and Folk- 
 lore, pride of Race will become an effective and 
 a healthy political incentive. It will weaken 
 temptation towards social strife within the State. 
 It will check arrogance, born as ever of ignor- 
 ance, in the attitude of one nation towards 
 another descended also from Aryan ancestors. 
 It will^ help us to respect non- Aryan Races more 
 
48 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 ancient than our own, albeit that centuries may 
 have elapsed since they swayed the fortunes or 
 defended the frontiers of any political State. It 
 may assist us to understand the Jews who have 
 endured ages of oppression, and can afford to 
 ignore them when they recall David and the 
 Macchabees, or remember that their ancestors 
 read and wrote immortal books, built palaces 
 and temples, the while our ancestors wandered 
 unkempt over snow-clad fells or threaded the 
 tangles of the Hercynian forest. 
 
 Nationalism, Chauvinism, Jingoism, in short, 
 by whatever name you call it, the hubristic 
 excess of political virtue, is not, I would argue, 
 justly chargeable to pride of Race. The idea of 
 Race does not inject, as it were, a venom of 
 arrogance into the sane body of Nationality. It 
 is rather the false, unhistorical view of Nation- 
 ality as co-extensive with one Race which gives 
 a dangerous momentum to a political sentiment 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 49 
 
 otherwise exalted and useful in the Develop- 
 ment of the State. Let pride be in Race, 
 patriotism for the Empire. 
 
 The several races or strains in a nation 
 enrich it, as they are held to enrich the nature 
 of a man. Fortunately we, whether we be 
 Scots, or English, or Irish, or Welsh, can lay 
 claim to many such strains ; perhaps to more 
 than we suspect or readily acknowledge. Yet, 
 if we are to assist at the birth of an organic 
 Empire-State, we must beware of excessive pride 
 even in Race. We may proudly vaunt our 
 lineage. Each man amongst us may claim to 
 represent not one only — that is almost always 
 a mistake — but two, or more, of the high-born 
 and valorous Aryan clans. But too great a 
 pride, however well founded on Aryan descent, 
 may unfit us for playing our part in construct- 
 ing a State that must embrace many non-Aryan 
 races. Is it certain that our pride in exclusive 
 
50 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 Aryan descent is wholly well-founded ? We 
 cannot be quite sure until the infant sciences of 
 Ethnology and Folk-lore have come to maturity. 
 For the time being we may reflect that the 
 Highland chieftain with a pedigree reaching 
 back to the Ark, the Norman noble, the heir of 
 Milesian tannists, the scion of Welsh princes 
 may each be forced, by the future advance of 
 these sciences, to admit in his veins some drops 
 of non-Aryan blood. They may have to 
 trace their descent, in some degree, also to 
 neolithic man who, during aeons before their 
 ancestors reached these isles, patiently exter- 
 minated the really large and dangerous species 
 of wild beasts, leaving to our high-born pro- 
 genitors only such small deer as may minister 
 to the pleasure of the chase. That may, or 
 may not, prove true. But in respect of many 
 inhabitants of these islands it is antecedently 
 probable. 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 51 
 
 When these islands were successively cut 
 off from the Continent by a sequence of geo- 
 logical depressions they were inhabited, and 
 not sparsely, by men whose stone implements 
 litter our fields and fill our museums. Did your 
 Irish ancestors, the Scots, who founded, here, 
 the kingdom of Dalriada, and so gave to our 
 Sovereign the remotest among his many foun- 
 tains of Regal origin, really kill all the men, and, 
 what is more to the point, all the women who 
 were Picts and spoke their non- Aryan language ? 
 I know that only five words of the Pictish tongue 
 remain. In an examination which allowed to can- 
 didates a free choice from all languages I should 
 select the Pictish language. It can be mastered 
 in one minute. But of all guides to ethnology 
 language is not the least fallacious. Languages, 
 like the cut of coats and trowsers, have been 
 assumed during all ages in order, not to earn a 
 living wage, but to live. Languages, historically 
 
52 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 and pre-historlcally, have been costumes. And 
 costumes cease to be customs when, Hke habits, 
 they are contracted from other people. Customs 
 yield a surer guide to race problems. Five 
 words only remain of the Pictish language, but 
 you, the Scots, reveal in your folk-lore rudi- 
 ments of customs that are certainly pre-historic, 
 and, as some hold, non-Aryan. Were the 
 Picts exterminated? Did not any Aryan in- 
 vader at any time marry a woman from the 
 races whom he and his clansmen overthrew ? 
 Many invasions of these islands are recorded 
 in history. Others are, I believe, truthfully 
 adumbrated in legend. From history and 
 legend we gather, and common-sense confirms, 
 that these invasions were prosecuted by picked 
 warriors in a few boats, no one of which 
 was large. The invaders drove up the 
 aborigines into hills and caves and came 
 to regard them as unhuman, as gnomes 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 53 
 
 or fairies. But then, are those tales pure in- 
 ventions which tell of Celtic chieftains marry- 
 ing fairy queens and princesses from the 
 people who dwelt in mounds ? Legend refracts 
 and distorts, but it rarely invents. That which 
 we know to have taken place in historic times 
 when an Osterling or a Norman married a 
 high-born Celtic maiden, may have taken place 
 in pre-historic times. 
 
 However that may be, the present inhabi- 
 tants of these islands are certainly descended 
 from many Aryan clans, and possibly descended 
 from yet earlier invaders. It should not, 
 therefore, be hard for us to avoid the danger 
 of undue insistence on a narrow interpretation 
 of the Race idea. We know that many a Race 
 has been driven up into our mountains, there 
 to preserve traditions from earlier ages as an 
 Arctic flora is preserved at high altitudes above 
 the sea. We know that many a race has 
 
54 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 reached our shores from those who, in pre- 
 historic eras, brought bronze and iron, down 
 to the Huguenots, who brought the art of 
 higher manufacture. But these islands were 
 the uttermost parts of the old world. Here 
 the westward rambling, whether of conquered 
 or conquering tribes, was stayed at the brink of 
 the Atlantic. And the fittest have survived ; 
 whether by moderation after victory, or by forti- 
 tude after defeat. Within these islands political 
 virtue has been accumulated from the Stone 
 Age onwards. Our political nature, called 
 insular, has never been isolated. It has been 
 enriched again and again, as the flora of islands 
 is diversified by bird-borne seeds. We are of 
 the highlands and islands, claiming the longest 
 tradition from the peaks of antiquity ; the 
 most varied fertilization from ocean transit. 
 
V 
 
 In order to direct the further Development 
 of the State by the light of the past we must 
 frankly accept features persistently exhibited in 
 every preceding type of the State. But we 
 must avoid undue emphasis on any one of 
 them. It would be inexcusable to mis-read 
 the lessons of the most recent epoch. Nation- 
 ality, the characteristic of the third epoch of 
 Western history, may, if its sentiment be exag- 
 gerated, expose the State to danger, either of 
 internal disruption, or of arrogance in external 
 relations. Let us revere Nationality ; let us also 
 recall that all Races, and some Empires, can 
 boast a longer existence than Nation-States. 
 
S6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 The remedy against exaggeration of National 
 sentiment lies in preferring — I would not put 
 it higher — the two ideas, of Empire and of 
 Race. 
 
 But preference even so discreet will not justify 
 complacency. If we insist unduly on the idea 
 of Race, we shall relapse into that error which 
 wrecked constructive efforts in the second epoch 
 of history. A too intensive culture of Race 
 tradition may frustrate yet again the trend of 
 political gravitation. On the other hand, if 
 we foster the idea of Empire at the cost of 
 Race tradition, we shall sink once more into 
 cosmopolitanism and court a recurrence of 
 that catastrophe which concluded the first 
 epoch. 
 
 I cannot say which of these two excesses 
 may spell the greater danger to the Develop- 
 ment of the State. We need, for the State 
 that is to be, both the intension of Race and 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 57 
 
 the extension of Empire. Perhaps, at a time 
 when facilities of transit are being multipHed 
 and cheapened until they fascinate our imagina- 
 tion and seem to speak with the very voice of 
 the Spirit of the Age, it is of cosmopolitan- 
 ism that we should most be ware. The Spirit 
 of the Age is seldom prophetic. A life of 
 polyglot restaurants and international sleeping- 
 cars does not conduce to civic virtue. It laps 
 us in the listlessness of cosmopolitan luxury. 
 It makes for satiety and slumber ; and 
 slumber, if unduly prolonged, invites a rude 
 awakening. Here you can help ; you of our 
 ancient University. In an age pre-eminently 
 of Transit there is greater need for Tradition. 
 The tendency towards cosmopolitanism is en- 
 forced by the multiplication of facilities for 
 Transit. Do not reinforce that tendency. 
 Listen to the Spirit of the Age, but remember 
 the Ages. Yield not an inch to popular 
 
58 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 clamour which would restrict a University 
 curriculum to applied science and modern 
 languages. Do not abandon the heaped 
 treasure of Humanistic learning. 
 
 We need the influence of facile Transit ; 
 we need the aids of applied science and modern 
 languages, but we need also the influence of 
 Tradition. And that is to be found in the 
 Literature and Legend of all ages, not in 
 languages and appliances of one time. It 
 must be sought in the Classics, in Archaeology, 
 in comparative Mythology, in Ethnology, and 
 in Folk-lore, for which Scodand offers a teem- 
 ing field. These unravel the heart and mind 
 of man. They declare how much of Piety 
 towards all the Past is needed for Faith in any 
 Future. Can we have that Faith ? I say. Yes, 
 if the idea of Race emerging from the crucible 
 of humanistic study shall cease to be a venom 
 in the Nation ; if the Nation, understanding^ 
 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE: .-.:3-^\ 
 
 its Race complexity, shall conform to ordered 
 co-existence with other Nations similarly com- 
 posed ; if the Empire, cherishing the legitimate 
 pride of ancient Race, and but humouring the 
 pretension of modern Nationality, be absolved 
 from internal antagonism and safeguarded from 
 cosmopolitan decay. 
 
 The perfected Empire-State of the Future, 
 to evoke universal allegiance, must appeal 
 to particular sentiment. Throughout its terri- 
 tories the influence of facilitated Transit must 
 provide ever more abundantly all that is useful 
 in the Present ; but the influence of cultivated 
 Tradition must also preserve all that is hallowed 
 from the Past. 
 
 If that can be compassed ; if full and equal 
 play shall be given to Transit and to Tradition, 
 to the horizontal and the vertical forces, whose 
 interaction co-ordinates the progress of mankind, 
 then to every citizen, wheresoever born and from 
 
6o THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE 
 
 whomsoever descended, the '* State " will in 
 deed and in truth become that which, for lack 
 of another name and for love of time-honoured 
 glories, our posterity may still call the British 
 Empire. 
 
 Butlei & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Froinc, and London. 
 
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