In democratic communities the sovereignty of the state is a residuum left over from the period of dynastic government; and though the divine right of kings is obsolete, we have not yet out-grown the derivative dogma of the divine right of governments. There still gathers around the state an odour of sanctity; and in minds that have a turn for abstraction it is apt to take shape as a sacrosanct objective reality. But soon or late the democratic peoples will have to look upon the state with a cold and business-like realism if they are to be delivered from the dangers that lurk in all quasi-religious and sentimental abasement to conventional idols. It is just this vague political devoutness that makes it easy for the common people to be stampeded into invidious commercial and military enterprises by statesmen schooled in a tradition either frankly dynastic or still deriving its main presuppositions from the dynastic period. There is no security for democracy except in a persistent posture of criticism towards its institutions; and there is no immediate hope of a sane restoration of our somewhat shattered fortunes except as we strip the halo away from the state and discuss it dispassionately in terms of its functions. Its police responsibilities remain with it as a matter of course, so long as human nature needs policing; and it must provisionally remain the organ of the community in its intercourse across its frontiers. With this latter we are not for the moment concerned; what falls to be considered is the problem of the state’s function in respect of, first, the present tendency to form extraneous and independent (and on occasion conceivably hostile and intractable) centres of authority, and second, the recent process of investing the state with a sort of proprietorship and pastorate at large. Summarily it may be said that the office of the state in respect of these two developments is that it should be on the one hand the clearing house of the increasing functional and professional associations among which its ancient sovereignty is being distributed, and on the other, the trustee of the public in the matter of producing and distributing the goods that are essential to life. The state of the case and the course of events indicate a doctrine of public ownership with democratic functional control, with the necessary machinery for the due co-ordination of the centres of control.