It is perfectly true that we cannot create the kind of State which will best subserve the interests of its citizens unless each is ready to give allegiance to it, irrespective of his immediate personal 'interest.' (The word is put in inverted commas because in most men not compelled by bad economic circumstances to fight fiercely for daily bread, sheer physical sustenance, the satisfaction of a social and creative instinct is a very real 'interest,' and would, in a well-organised society, be as spontaneous as interest in sport or social ostentation.) The State must be an idea, an abstraction, capable of inspiring loyalty, embodying the sense of interdependence. But the circumstances of the independent modern national State, in frequent and unavoidable contact with other similar States, are such as to stimulate not mainly the motives of social cohesion, but those instincts of domination which become anti-social and disruptive. The nationalist stands condemned not because he asks allegiance or loyalty to the social group, but first, because he asks absolute allegiance to something which is not the social group but only part of it, and secondly, because that exclusive loyalty gives rise to disruptive pugnacities, injurious to all. In pointing out the inadequacy of the unitary political Nation-State as the embodiment of final sovereignty, an inadequacy due to precisely the development of such organisations as Labour, the present writer merely anticipated the drift of much political writing of the last ten years on the problem of State sovereignty; as also the main drift of events.[125] If Mr Lindsay finds the very mild suggestions in _The Great Illusion_ touching the necessary qualification of the sovereignty of the Nation-State subversive, one wonders what his feelings are on reading, say, Mr Cole, who in a recent book (_Social Theory_) leaves the Political State so attenuated that one questions whether what is left is not just ghost. At the best the State is just one collateral association among others.