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 medi?val 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 embraced306 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.
 
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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 significant308 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.
 
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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.
 
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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 basis311 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,312 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 principle313 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 since314 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.
 
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In the long run there will be compensation. The agriculturists will eventually benefit by the diversification of the national life. But “in the ............