olations of the
World's peace. Hence, whether we have regard to internal good
government, or the maintenance of international justice, the need of
military force is imperative. Not only does there exist what the
Russians quaintly call a "Christ-serving and worthy militancy," there
are occasions, of which the present is one, when military service
becomes the highest form of Christian duty. To hold aloof is not to
display a superior form of Christianity; it is to be an apostate. As
Solovyof has impressively shown in his notable conversations on _War and
Christianity_, pacificism under present conditions is that very sort of
religious imposture with which is associated the abominable name of
Antichrist.

VI

THE STATE AND ITS RIVALS

I. THE IDEA OF THE STATE IN ENGLAND

Most of our recent political troubles are attributable to what Fortescue
in the fifteenth century called "lack of governance." We are all of us
painfully aware of the fact; but we are not all of us equally conscious
that the feebleness and inefficiency of our supreme administration are
to no small extent due to the absence among our people as a whole of any
adequate idea of the position and function of the State. For if it is
true generally that every nation has the sort of government that it
deserves, it is specially true of a nation with democratic institutions.
Weaknesses of intellect, infirmities of will, and faults of character in
the sovereign representative assembly are but reproductions on a
magnified scale of the same defects in the electorate. It is the failure
of our people as a whole to realize the idea of the State that has
resulted in the filling of the House of Commons with men who stand, not
for the Nation in its unity and the Empire in its integrity, but for all
sorts of limited and conflicting sectional interests--parties, leagues,
fellowships, unions, cliques, schools, churches, orders, classes,
trusts, syndicates, and so on. No wonder that in times of national and
imperial crisis such representatives prove totally unequal to the duty
of strong, corporate, and patriotic administration.

The weakness of the idea of the State among the peoples of the British
Isles is explicable on geographical and historical grounds. For the idea
of the State--that is to say, the idea of society politically organized
as an indivisible unit under a sovereign government--although it has
other and deeper sources of vitality, is specially fo