he common interests of all. The difference between a trade
union and a parliamentary constituency is that the sub-division of the
general common interest which each represents rests on a different basis
of division. The whole community might as well be organized by vocations
as it now is by localities. There would seem to be certain advantages in
both principles of differentiation, and one obvious practical solution
of our present difficulties is that the supreme organ of government
should in its two chambers represent the nation as organized on both
principles, vocational and territorial.

We seem to have come now to the discussion of political machinery, but,
as in our discussion of the League of Nations, we can see that our
attitude to such questions of machinery will vary as we regard the
force-bearing organization with its national and territorial basis as
the primary fact in the community, to be distinguished sharply from all
other organizations, or regard the possession of organized force as the
expression of men's settled and permanent will to maintain their common
interests and safeguard the conditions of the good life. If we
consistently follow out Green's dictum that will, not force, is the
basis of the state, we shall be anxious that the political organization
to which we render obedience shall follow the actual ramifications of
common interests and of men's willingness to co-operate, and shall
recognize that the national state with its territorial basis represents
only one form of such ramification.

The view that political action is not confined to constitutional and
governmental channels will not imply that we must give up the
distinction between society and the state. For, on the one hand, trade
unions have only arisen because of the special need for a _common_
safeguarding of common interests produced by economic relations.
Economic relations need to be controlled by, but cannot be superseded
by, politics. On the other hand, as we have seen, the work of such
associations as churches is different in kind from the work done by
political organizations. The inculcation and development of moral ideals
and the safeguarding of the conditions of the good life are
complementary functions. Each is impossible without the other. But that
does not make them identical, however closely interfused they may be.

If, then, we accept the political theory of idealism as a theory of
society, we must recognize in social li