THE FUNCTION OF THE STATE The fundamental difference of opinion in this matter lies be tween those who, on the one hand, preserve the Greek conception of the State as an all-inclusive association in which every member should find opportunity of complete self-expression and those, on the other hand, who regard the State as an instrument created by men, in society for certain limited and specified purposes. The one conception leads to a "panarchist" position, in which all the activities of individuals and groups are correlated and co-ordinated within a great scheme of social life of which the State is the supreme and all-embracing expression ; the other conception is individualist in trend, seeks to limit the functions of the State to a definite sphere beyond which its "interference" is resented, regards law with Bentham as "a necessary evil," and is in its logical ideal "anarchistic," since it would conceive a society of enlightened individuals working harmoniously together without coercive rules as its utopia. Political theory moves between these two poles, and representatives of almost every possible inter mediate position could be named.
Panarchism.—In modern times the "panarchist" position was that upon which the nation-states began to operate. The revolt against Rome in the Protestant states is in part evidence of this. In England the king in the act of throwing off the Roman al legiance, declared "that this realm of England is an empire . . . governed by one supreme head and king ... he being also in stitute and furnished . . . with plenary whole and entire power ... to render and yield justice and final determination . . . in all causes . . . without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world" (Act of Appeals . Nor did any doubt cross the mind of Tudor Englishmen of the right of the State to control and direct commerce and industry. The unity of national life—political, religious, economic—was more completely realized than ever before or since. Not less, but more completely, was the panarchic ideal pursued upon the con tinent—at least in the kingdoms of France and Spain. If these Catholic monarchs could not extrude the pope from all juris diction in their realms they could and did put the papal power in leading strings, as far as their own realms were concerned, and control its exercise: and with less deeply-rooted organized oppo sition to face than their English rivals they carried the control of commerce and industry, of religion and education, even of art and literature far beyond the limits possible for an English king. In particular religious unity was insisted on, and the expulsion of the Moriscoes from Spain under Philip III., and of the Hugue nots from France under Louis XIV. is sufficient testimony of the price these monarchs were prepared to pay for unity.
Yet the religious dissensions of the i6th and i 7th centuries brought to the birth a new and powerful trend of opinion which has not yet spent its force. The exercise of private judgment in the interpretation of the scriptures led to an increasing number of differences of opinion with the consequent formation of new sects. For long the "panarchistic" Protestant States would suffer, no more easily than their Catholic neighbours, any challenge to their internal unity. So Calvin burned Servetus, as the French king would gladly have burned Calvin ; so Henry VIII. be headed Thomas More as his daughter Mary burned Cranmer. Those to whom the situation seemed intolerable at first pro posed in fuller and more philosophical terms the doctrine of the Compromise of Augsburg "Cuius regio, eius religio," and Bodin writing during the French religious wars, Hobbes dur ing the Great Rebellion would seek to quiet religious strife by insisting that the sovereign power in each state must be left to settle the religious problem in its own way : the individual's right being limited to that of thinking, though not of acting, speaking or writing, as he wished. Not so easily could the desire of men to worship after their own fashion, to prophesy freely, to propa gate their opinions, be controlled, and this reassertion of the panarchistic idea was doomed to failure. It was succeeded, through the practical necessities of the situation, by a gradual movement towards toleration which gained momentum as ex perience showed that a dissident from the State church might yet be a good and loyal citizen. How slow the movement was, how reluctant the abandonment of the idea of the State as a "partner ship in all science, a partnership in all art : a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection" (Burke Reflections on the Revolu tion in France) an Englishman realizes on reflecting that Burke wrote those words in 179o, that the major civil disabilities on Roman Catholics were not removed from the Statute Book till 1829, that Jews could not sit in the House of Commons till and that the late Lord Acton (1834-1902) was, because of his Catholicism, unable as a young man to enter the university of which in his old age he became professor of Modern History.
The i 9th century opened, therefore, with a new conception of the function of the State. This was conceived as properly confined to the maintenance of order—a term which emphatically included the enforcement of the laws of property—so that the organization of the army and navy and the enforcement of a minimum of law by the police and the courts summed up the main duties of government. Taxation was, in this view, admitted as necessary for the maintenance of the armed forces and the police and judicial systems, but the machinery of government needed hardly more than an admiralty, a ministry of war, and a home office, together with a treasury to supply the other services with money. For the rest the life of the citizen was to be left to his own unaided activities. His religion, his family life, his education, his business, his amusements, were his own affair.
This individualist movement was greatly assisted in the mid dle of the century by the application, or misapplication, of a crude version of Darwinian biological theory to the political sphere. As the "survival of the fittest" was the law of nature in the realm of physical evolution, so it was held to be in the struggle of man with man in social life. Not quite logically, such writers as Herbert Spencer eagerly adopted an apparently "scien tific" view which supported their resistance to every form of State "interference"; whilst the view naturally gained much currency amongst those favourably placed in the economic strug gle who could feel an almost moral indignation at any attempt on the part of the State to interfere with the beneficent operation of the competitive principle in economic life.
Reaction against the more extreme individualism began early in the ranks of individualists themselves. J. S. Mill made consider able modifications in the system which he had received from Bentham and his father, James Mill. In particular, in his Political Economy, he was prepared to support, in the name of individual liberty, laws (e.g., limiting hours of work or providing money for education) which would redress the inequality of fortune and give opportunities of self-development to the less fortunate individuals in the State which they could not hope to obtain either by their separate or combined efforts. Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge con tinued the modification of Utilitarian Individualism and brought ethics, even if a hedonistic ethics, again into relation with politics. Yet both these writers are nearer the anarchistic than the panarchistic "pole," in principle, individualists to the end.
"Panarchistic" theory of the function of the State has a con tinuous history in modern times and, during the last fifty years, has had the current of political experience in its favour. Rousseau, in a certain sense truly regarded as an arch-individualist, is yet to be regarded as the "father of modern idealism" in that, in the Contrat Social he is prepared to recognize that the State is a moral being, with a life and will of its own, and that the indi vidual may find his true liberty in being compelled to obey a law which he is neither sufficiently morally elevated to desire nor rationally enlightened to understand. Still more profoundly and far more subtly was the panarchistic idea of the State worked out by Hegel, the influence of whose philosophy upon modern political thought it would be difficult to overestimate.
It has been said that panarchism has had experience on its side. The individualism of the early i 9th century, coincident with the great industrial developments of the time, brought not only much prosperity but also deep misery in its train. Unregulated compe tition produced the horrors which shocked even the complacency of mid-Victorian England into the State "interference" embodied in the Factory Acts. Further the development of the spirit of nationalism, combined with the increasing acceptance of demo cratic principle, made the existence of the "two nations" rich and poor within the confines of each State of which Disraeli wrote, in creasingly intolerable for the sensitive of both sections. Tory paternalist democracy in England finds its counterpart in the Lib eral Empire of Napoleon III., in the social reforms of Bismarck in Germany : and in all three countries the attempts of authority to adapt itself to the demands of the masses were by those masses condemned as insufficient and they turned to socialism to supply their demands. In time, under the pressure of socialism, united in its many divergent forms at least in condemning "laissez faire," the modern State has developed new governmental institutions to deal with the complex conditions of modern life. It has, on the whole reluctantly, accepted a moral responsibility for the welfare of its citizens, and has gradually been re-assuming, the more easily as its response to demands for assistance brought it new loyalty and support, the character of moral controller and co-ordinator of effort for the good life which, in the Greek conception of politics, properly belonged to it.
The Development of the Functions of Government in the Modern State.—Neither in France nor in the federal legislation of America has the extension of governmental activity been so great as in England (see GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS), in the one case because of the conservatism of the senate and the dis traction from social legislation caused by the struggle between Church and State, in the other case because of the individualist interpretation of the constitution by the supreme court and the fact that, for the most part, the province of social legislation falls within the reserved legislative sphere of the individual states of the union. Yet the Prohibition Amendment is enough to show that Americans do not, in certain cases, shrink from the use of governmental action for attempting to secure a moral end, and in some of the individual states social legislation has been varied and wide in scope. In Germany the same tendency showed itself during the "paternalist" rule of Bismarck, and the establishment of the republic, with the greatly increased political influence of the Socialist Parties, is a guarantee of its continuance. Finally the integral unity of the State, and the omnicompetence of govern ment, is, though in different ways, most clearly and completely worked out in the governmental systems of Russia and Italy.
The reaction against State interference in industry which fol lowed upon the extension of State activity during the War seems (1928) to have spent its force, whilst on the other hand, the de mand for direct state control of industrial organisation embodied in the demand for nationalisation of, e.g., railways or coal-mines no longer implies a bureaucratic organisation of such industries by a civil service. The general tendency is to admit that some measure of legal control over industrial and commercial activities is frequently necessary in the interests of the citizen as consumer as well as in his capacity as producer, but that such control should be directed rather to the establishment of reasonable conditions of work and wages, and to the protection of the consumer from un reasonable prices, than to any direct conduct of business enter prises by officials appointed by the State.
No general bibliography of so wide a subject is possible, and readers are referred to the separate bibliographies at the end of the various articles mentioned. The three most important recent works of a general kind on the subject of modern government are: Viscount Bryce, Modern Democracies (1921) ; A. Eomein, Elements de droit constitutionnel francais et compare (192 7) ; and G. Jellinek, Allge meine Staatslehre (1922). J. P.)