Up to this point we have considered the more general problems of fellowship in the community as a whole; we have still to consider some of the questions raised by the more particular associations which form themselves within the community, and in which by far the largest measure of the community’s vitality resides. F. W. Maitland, in an interesting passage, reviews the endless variety of social forms in which men group themselves together. He speaks of “churches, and even the mediæval church, one and catholic, religious houses and mendicant orders, nonconforming bodies, a presbyterian system, universities, old and new, the village community, which Germanists have revealed to us, the manor in its growth and decay, the township, the New England town, the counties and hundreds, the chartered boroughs, the guild in all its manifold varieties, the Inns of Court, the merchant adventurers, the militant “companies” of English _condottieri_ who, returning home, help to make the word “company” popular among us: the trading companies, the companies that became colonies, the companies that make war, the friendly societies, the Trade Unions, the clubs, the group that meets at Lloyd’s Coffee House, the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, and so on even to the one man company, the Standard Oil Trust, and the South Australian statutes for communistic villages.” The prevailing political philosophy of our time has stated its problem almost wholly in terms of an abstract state over against an abstract individual; and one of the most heartening signs of the invasion of political thought and practice by a more healthy humanism is the growing recognition of these many-coloured nucleations of life. There are important and difficult questions bearing upon their political and legal status, but these are only to be answered by a frank acknowledgment that groupings of this kind come into being because they meet a real need and answer to certain facts of life and human nature. No political philosophy is likely to stand the racket of historical experience which does not stand upon the assumption that these associations have a real and inherent right to form themselves, to exist, to thrive and to multiply; for it is in groups that are voluntarily formed around a living interest that the most significant and important part of our life is lived. To the more direct political implications of this type of association we shall turn at a later point; here we are concerned only to emphasise the need and the right of such bodies to live, and their importance for the preservation of the balance of life, and therefore, of stable social progress. Their real importance may be seen from the circumstance that the struggle for religious liberty in England, which has historically been the spring of civil and political liberty, was a struggle not for the liberty of the individual but of the small voluntarily associated group.