er can be cut
out of the body politic.

XIX.

It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by the
State must become ever greater. It is in the evolutionary process. The
amalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as much
in the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings out
of unicellular organisms. I believe this process will continue until
humanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, it
will manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individual
will share. Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of the
world alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent
cavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in our
subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the
State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular,
makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It lays
hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and
to send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choice
or judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong,
the individual must be prepared to give his body for the commonwealth,
and when one gives the body unresistingly, one gives the soul also.
The marvelous thing about the authority of the State is that it is
recognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace the
citizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State. He may
call it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to preserve
for it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over the spirit
of man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on history, and see
with what labor and sacrifice the State was established. But we see
also how readily, once the union has been brought about, men will die
to preserve it, even although it is a tyranny, a bad State. For what
do they die unless the spirit in man has some inner certitude that the
divine event to which humanity tends is a unity of its multitudinous
life, and that a State--even a bad State--must be preserved by its
citizens, because it is at least an attempt at organic unity? It is a
simulacrum of the ideal; it contains the germ or possibility of that to
which the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual in
service to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, and
a bad State is better tha