f mystical, half superficial. Talk
to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must
get it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as the
Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the
miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses its
well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve
that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men
and women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask
is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment
after the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whether
through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and
resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of
dealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of
crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they
cannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of the
State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals,
and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood
of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the
vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The
Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was
more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt that
it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled
by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple
of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much
that was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thing
that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next
generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we
have learned from her.

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a
study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of
the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the
Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that
distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave
them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government
which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations
were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire