matter is how we are prepared to treat other people, for what purposes we are prepared to act with them, how far we are prepared to recognize and give settled organized recognition to our mutual obligations. The political organization is the vehicle and not the creator of these moral facts. As the facts vary, so will its forces. We may learn from the Hegelian school to recognize the enormous importance of the state, the great achievement of the human spirit which its organization represents, and the folly of light-heartedly endangering its existence, without making one form which it has taken in the nation state sacrosanct and absolute. Let us turn now to the second of our problems, the relation of the state to associations, such as churches and trade unions, within its borders. Here again we find a principle, originating in earlier individualist theory, taken up into idealism. In the beginnings of modern political theory in the seventeenth century, the absolutist doctrine of the state was the outcome of the need of the times for strong government. A state that was not master in its own house was felt to be incapable of the hard task these troublous times set before it. The French Revolution made no change in the attitude of the state to associations. New-born democracy was not inclined to look favourably on the independence of religious non-democratic associations, and the fact that Leviathan had become democratic was thought to have transformed him into a monster within whose capacious maw any number of Jonahs might live at ease or liberty. Association against a tyrant might be a sacred duty; against the people it could only be a suspicious superfluity. In a very different way the Prussian state, centralized, efficient, and Erastian, organizing the whole resources of the community under the guidance of the state, enforced the same principle. The state is a moral institution, it cannot surrender the inculcation and upholding of morality to an alien or independent body. From all the sources of modern idealistic political theory, Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, comes the same principle of state absolutism over associations within the state. The principle was put in idealistic form in the doctrine that the state is a supra-personal will, absorbing in itself the activities of its members.