martyrs,
act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
the centuries. And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.

Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
the actions of individuals. And he therefore is the greatest statesman
who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
to the individual--whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
adventure! The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
the self-communings of Mazzini.

Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals. The unity
of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
distinct from the unity of those parts. Even in chemistry the laws
which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
constituent atoms. And in that highest and most complex of all
unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
unities which compose it. In the region in which States act and
interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals. The orbit
described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
the orbit of the separate life. The life which the individual
surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
conditions.

These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
bet