If the account given is at all in the right direction, it explains the gap already mentioned between the facts of political action and theories of the state. Men have looked in the wrong place. They have sought for the key to the nature of the state in the field of agencies, in that of doers of deeds, or in some will or purpose back of the deeds. They have sought to explain the state in terms of authorship. Ultimately all deliberate choices proceed from somebody in particular; acts are performed by somebody, and all arrangements and plans are made by somebody in the most concrete sense of “somebody.” Some John Doe and Richard Roe figure in every transaction. We shall not, then, find the public if we look for it on the side of originators of voluntary actions. Some John Smith and his congeners decide whether or not to grow wheat and how much, where and how to invest money, what roads to build and travel, whether to wage war and if so how, what laws to pass and which to obey and disobey. The actual alternative to deliberate acts of individuals is not action by the public; it is routine, impulsive and other unreflected acts also performed by individuals. Individual human beings may lose their identity in a mob or in a political convention or in a joint-stock corporation or at the polls. But this does not mean that some mysterious collective agency is making decisions, but that some few persons who know what they are about are taking advantage of massed force to conduct the mob their way, boss a political machine, and manage the affairs of corporate business. When the public or state is involved in making social arrangements like passing laws, enforcing a contract, conferring a franchise, it still acts through concrete persons. The persons are now officers, representatives of a public and shared interest. The difference is an important one. But it is not a difference between single human beings and a collective impersonal will. It is between persons in their private and in their official or representative character. The quality presented is not authorship but authority, the authority of recognized consequences to control the behavior which generates and averts extensive and enduring results of weal and woe. Officials are indeed public agents, but agents in the sense of factors doing the business of others in securing and obviating consequences that concern them.