So that both from within and without, the march of events is disintegrating the dogma of state-sovereignty. The traditional political acceptances are rapidly becoming obsolete. In the main this would appear to be due to the new situation created by the swift development of the means of communication during the last century. The territorial factor in the delimitation of states and in their own internal economy, has ceased to have the importance it possessed in days when distance set sharp limits to the intercourse of men. Those days are now past; and national frontiers and county boundaries are being gradually effaced by steam, and the sea has been bridged by the electric current and the aeroplane. II The problem created in this way is not in its essence a new one. Since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict between the national state and the church—whether conceived as an independent association within the commonwealth or as an international society—has provided some of the most significant passages of political history. The struggle for religious freedom in England (which in the event proved the spring of other liberties) was essentially a struggle to secure the right of voluntary religious associations to determine their own religious life and practices; and while the legal decision in the Scottish Churches’ case was a revival of the Austinian doctrine of state-sovereignty, and an assertion on the part of the state of its own right to sit in judgment upon the religious proceedings of a church, the ensuing situation proved so impossible (as has already been pointed out) that the legal decision had to be annulled by a special piece of legislation. Since that decision most of the “free” churches in England have taken steps to safeguard themselves against similar intrusions on the part of the state. In the present situation, however, such security cannot be absolute since the state still has something to say to the legal instruments under which the churches hold their temporalities. But the entire episode shows how clear is the British sense that the omnicompetency of the state does not extend into the sphere of religious life and practice; and the “Life and Liberty” movement in the Established Church of England is an indication that the control of the state even over a state church is not beyond challenge.