Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 175

conception which pervades the political literature of Greece and Rome, that, to use the words of Professor Mahaffy, “all citizens should be regarded as the property of the State”; or that—to put it in Bluntschli’s more detailed phrases—the sovereignty of the State was absolute, that individual freedom as against the State was unknown, and that the existing political relations embraced the whole life of the individual, the whole range of his duties and activities—civil, social, moral, and religious.”

The enormous military significance of such a conception of society, when associated with the principle of exclusive citizenship, resting in the last resort on a moral-religious basis, is only fully brought into prominence on reflection. The deeper we go in the study of the life of the Greek and Roman peoples at the period of their highest development, the more clearly does the fact reveal itself that the State as organised was a condition in which the principal end and business of the people was war ; not simply from the desires of the citizens, but from causes which were innate in the State itself. It was of necessity an organisation of society in which, to use the forcible words of Bagehot, ‘every intellectual gain was made use of, was invested, and taken out in war.”* An organisation, that is to say, in which, as Plato makes Clinias of Crete say in the Laws, the supreme end of effort was victory in war, when “that which men call peace is only a name, the reality being war, according to nature, to all against all States.”* It was a condition of society in which

1 Problems in Greek History, by J. P. Mahaffy, p. 89. 2 The Theory of the State, by J. K. Bluntschli, p. 58 e¢. seg. 3 Physics and Politics, by Walter Bagehot, p. 49. 4 Laws, I.