I. The Community and the
Individual

To many of us the war came as a great awakening; it forced on our attention facts of which we were quite unconscious. Some of us had dreamed that war with all its horrors was a thing that we had outgrown; Mr. Buckle thought it survived exceptionally among less advanced peoples; Mr. Angel thought that the world would realise that all countries were so interrelated that it never could be to the interest of any one to go to war. But war,

with accumulated horrors, has not only been possible-it was deliberately planned by a nation which believed that in pursuing its own interest at this juncture it would bring about the better organisation of the world.

But if the outbreak of the war was a shock, the difficulties which have arisen since the war have also been a revelation. We had been wont to assume that organised society, as we knew it before the war, was a good thing-not by any means perfect, but with faults which might be corrected, especially by a diffusion of education; and it has been quite new to many of us to realise

that underneath the widely spread industrial unrest lies a deep dissatisfaction with society as organised, and that while most of us are anxious for speedy reconstruction on similar but improved lines, there are others who regard capital as the enemy, and the bourgeoisie and intellectual elements in society as useless parasites.

Many of us have not found it necessary to go very thoroughly into the rationale of civilised society, but have assumed with Locke that every man would find an advantage in living under the authority of law, and would enjoy his personal life in greater security. Those who hold that, though this is true for people who have property, organised society is of no advantage to those who have nothing to lose, make us feel that not only the exceptional incidents in modern civilisation, but its normal conditions, are being called in question, and that the respective claims of the individual and of the community are being pressed with unwonted vehemence. It seems no longer possible to take for granted that the individual makes the most of his own life in organised society, and when the lives of individuals and of the community are weighed against each other, we seem to have no standard by which we can decide between them. The two can be taken together, and we can aim at regulating society so that it affords wholesome conditions for individuals,

and we see that the better the individuals are, the better are the prospects for a society as a whole, but when they are set in opposition and weighed one against the other, we seem to have lost our bearings altogether.

Political philosophy can give us no help; its business is to consider the good government and effective administration of the State, and it is not directly concerned to lay down any doctrine for the individual. In so far as the individual consciously separates himself from the State and pursues his own interest apart from that of the State he is condemned by political philosophy, whether he is an absolute monarch who thinks only of his own pleasure, or a bad citizen who busies himself in considering what he can get out of the State, and is always interested in seeing where he comes in. That the individual can render great service to the State is clear enough; this was the remarkable feature of the eighteenth century which is too often overlooked by those who stigmatise it as indifferent to duties of many kinds. There were individuals from Boyle onwards who deplored the unwillingness of the State to spend time and money on what they regarded as public duties, and who did not feel themselves excused or able to acquiesce in this indifference. There was increased care for human life, in the providing of hospitals, and in the work which culminated in the creation

of the Royal Humane Society. Berkeley and Bray took up the White Man's Burden anew, and before the end of the century the public conscience was roused about slavery and about the exploiting of India. When once the way was shown, the State was persuaded to follow. Political philosophy is more apt to call for service and sacrifice from the individual than to consider how to make the most of him.

Political economy from the time of Adam Smith onwards was inclined to look more favourably on the individual. Individual initiative was recognised as a force which might tend in many ways to the public good; private property was regarded as a condition which ensured the most strenuous activity, but experience showed that there were limits to its beneficial action, and that cut-throat competition was not necessarily good for society or for the individuals which composed it. But political economy has hardly attempted to suggest any compromise which might leave the public in possession of the benefits of private initiative without giving scope for the exhibition of personal selfishness.

Though political economy has outlived the narrowness of concentrating attention on the economic man, it remains a descriptive science of the play of human affairs, and does not pretend to indicate what the character of the individual ought to be. The difficulty in reconciling the individual and the community becomes greater

when we take account of the element of time. The life of the State extends over many generations of individual lives, and the State must take account of a future in which the individual cannot expect to have a direct part. What is good for the individual in the present may have injurious results on the community in the long run. The free labourers obtained an extraordinary rise of wages after the Black Death, but the Tudor reigns were rendered miserable by the frequency of unemployment. The distresses of the spinners in 1793 were relieved by the granting of allowances in addition to wages. But experience soon began to show that the whole population was becoming pauperised. If the individual is willing to be self-centred, he cannot throw himself heartily into the point of view which would be adopted by the good citizen who is concerned for the prosperity of the country in the long run. There is necessarily a tendency to regard the life of the State as of supreme importance, and to treat the individual life as a means to carrying it on and rendering it better.

In this uncertainty, it may be worth while to consider the claims of Christianity, as commonly regarded, to deal with the problem. Christianity is not under any temptation to subordinate the importance of the individual to the State. While Tertullian and others were fully alive to the greatness of the Roman Empire and