Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed illustrated--unfortunately illustrated as it happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.