stered by a sense
of national danger, but tends to languish when complete immunity from
external peril can be postulated. Never has the realization of "the
commonwealth of this realm of England" been so strong as it was in the
days when Spanish invasion threatened. The splendid patriotism of that
great age is portrayed for all time in the immortal glory of
Shakespeare's historical plays. Not far short, however, rose the
patriotic realization of national unity during the crisis of the
Napoleonic struggle. Wordsworth's magnificent _Sonnets dedicated_ to
Liberty remain as the enduring memorial of the heights which British
State-consciousness then attained:

In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

But, except at rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her
people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the
conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the
State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as
possible be abated, as an intruder into the sphere of private enterprise
which should be extruded, as an enemy to liberty which should be
suppressed. It may readily be admitted that in days before the State had
been democratized this hostile attitude was not without justification.
In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the State meant the
Stuart monarch--_L'Etat c'est Moi_--and the interests of the Stuart
monarch were by no means those of any of the nations that he governed.
In the early eighteenth century the State meant the Whig oligarchy, and
its members only too easily came to regard the welfare of the Empire as
identical with their own prosperity. In the early nineteenth century the
State meant the landed and moneyed magnates of the Tory aristocracy, and
they had an extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and
aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised
authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of
Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form
of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton
and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also
proclaimed a doctr