For this movement, two circumstances appear to be accountable. Of these the first is the growth of an ill-defined and only partially understood sense of collective responsibility for the well-being of the social whole. Old Age Pensions, for instance, appear to constitute the proper alternative to the precarious charity or the degrading “poor relief” to which a less self-respecting social past committed the industrial veteran. The means of communication similarly appear to a reasonably educated community to be a public service rather than a gold-mine for private individuals or concerns. The second circumstance is the prestige which accrued to the state from the reaction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the bankrupt individualism of the preceding generations. In their recoil from the anarchy of _laissez faire_ and industrial competition men sought sanctuary in the state; and in the event the state gained a repute for competency which led to a facile transference to it of all those interests that appear to bear materially upon the life of the community as a whole. But without prejudice to the question of public ownership, it may be observed that while the impulse which led to this regard for the state was natural and admirable, it had the effect of concentrating in the state a volume of power which was entirely ominous to the liberties of the individual. Indeed, it may be said without much hesitation that the logic of state-absolutism was revealed by the Germans only in time to save their neighbours from the like tragedy of incontinent subjection to the state. And the sense of personal responsibility was in danger of atrophy under the pleasing and soporific influence of the popular idea that the state was a sort of fairy god-mother who could be trusted to step in and make good individual derelictions and delinquencies—which frame of mind accorded well with the related drift towards unquestioning submission to the state. IV