of government can be stated in terms of the state and the individual; it will have to take increasing account of the relation of the state to the powerful voluntary organisations of citizens within the state—organisations which, because they are voluntary, may exercise a more powerful influence upon their members than the state can possibly do. On the economic side this tendency toward the breaking up and the distribution of centralised authority among functional and professional groups, takes the form of Guild Socialism; and, while Syndicalism has not yet succeeded in gaining a wide footing in Europe, its challenge to the state has added a good deal to the minimising influences already afoot. It is worth while observing that these independent organisations are already so powerful that the British Government found it advisable to administer its National Insurance Act through Labour Unions and Friendly Societies. Footnote 37: Since these words were written, they have received very clear confirmation in the recent activities of the “Triple Alliance.” But it is not the growth of powerful organisations _within_ the Commonwealth alone that is making for the disintegration of state-sovereignty. We are living in a period when great international bodies are coming into being, and while most of these are at present of a cultural and professional type, it is evident that one at least is of a character which involves a very profound challenge to the sovereignty of the national state. The Socialist International has not been destroyed by the war; it has only been interrupted; and if the signs are not wholly misleading, we may look for a steady and wide extension of the international proletarian movement. In 1914 it proved too immature to resist the pressure of nationalism, but it is likely that in the future it will increasingly arm itself against a like collapse. As yet it is only in the case of the Socialist International that there is a direct challenge to the national state; but it would require considerable hardihood to deny the possibility that other international professional and functional associations may find themselves at variance with the constituted authorities of national states. For instance, the problem of hygiene is becoming more and more an international affair; and it is no unthinkable thing that a medical international may find itself at odds with the state authorities just as the British Medical Association found itself in conflict with its own national Government. One has only to add in this connection that the project of a League of Nations will require an abdication of the claim to absolute sovereignty on the part of the states constituting it.[38] Footnote 38: This cession of sovereignty may be hidden by a formal _camouflage_; but there can be no real League of Nations without it.