War is the Health of the State: With the shock of war the State comes into its own again.

[Raymond]

War Is the Health of the State
by Randolph Bourne
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First part of an essay entitled "The State," which was left unfinished
at Bourne's untimely death in 1918
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To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant
the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State
which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a
sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times
of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political
controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of
party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which
the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a
shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of
patriotic holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has
almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it
has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out
of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again.
The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is
fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been
hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal
and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes,
it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world.
The result is that, even in those countries where the business of
declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of
an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy
and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good
democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in
which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State
in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to
the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the
freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all
foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall
war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the
Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular
bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation,
and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms
the basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population
spreading over a certain geographical portion of the earth's surface,
speaking a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization.
Our idea of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of
a people, its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and
art, its characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans
because we live in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors
have carried on a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization,
because we live in certain kinds of communities which have a certain
look and express their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that
our civilization is different from contiguous civilizations like the
Indian and Mexican. The institutions of our country form a certain
network which affects us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way
that these other civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for
better or for worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of
physiological laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the
time we have reached what are called years of discretion, its
influences have molded our habits, our values, our ways of thinking,
so that however aware we may become, we never really lose the stamp of
our civilization, or could be mistaken for the child of any other
country. Our feeling for our fellow countrymen is one of similarity or
of mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud of and congenial to
our particular network of civilization, or we may detest most of its
qualities and rage at its defects. This does not alter the fact that
we are inextricably bound up in it. The Country, as an inescapable
group into which we are born, and which makes us its particular kind
of a citizen of the world, seems to be a fundamental fact of our
consciousness, an irreducible minimum of social feeling.

Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think
of our own people merely as living on the earth's surface along with
other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but
fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception
of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than
there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within
rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and
our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need
no greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than
this sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less
attuned, and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for
country would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of
State and Government which are associated with it. Country is a
concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State
is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a
group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being
born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we
learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group
acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of
justice. International politics is a "power politics" because it is a
relation of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously
are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be
hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in
relation to another country, or in imposing laws on its own
inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it
is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is quite
different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama
of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and
the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the
carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes.
But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world,
making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from
being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees
are offensive, and collecting money to pay for all.

Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor
Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State,
carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the
administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.
Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in
the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign
of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has
necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government
is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no
means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is
something that must never be forgotten. Its glamour and its
significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its
activities.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and
reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace
the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.
For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State
is that within its territory its power and influence should be
universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of
man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political
salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of
the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for
union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most
unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act
offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.
The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become
the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member
of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing
down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches.
All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible
to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military
defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly
struggled to become - the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's
business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-
currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but
with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end,
toward the "peacefulness of being at war," of which L.P. Jacks has so
unforgettably spoken.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive
role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of
activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine,
many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques
must be learned. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have
remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service
overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant
classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals
are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as universal
touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every
individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by
which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the
State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting
spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating
such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority
opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be
dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes,
with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State,
objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the
beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far
exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public
opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the
schools, becomes one solid block. "Loyalty," or rather war orthodoxy,
becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations.
Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life.
There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so
that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach
physics or to hold honorable place in a university - the republic of
learning - if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association
with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher.
Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are
suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic
products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints
of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy
music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken
against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such
an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works
impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies
and traditional conformities, or even ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy
of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers
lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon
on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty
years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion
throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for
passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience
the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties;
the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly
around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really
to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty,
perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the
amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often
their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their
resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime
attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at
the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be
produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty - or mystic
devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. Other
values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the
enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed,
and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the
amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these
values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into
sacrificing them.

War - or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a
powerful enemy - seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the
most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer
indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is
brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full
realization of that collective community in which each individual
somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every
citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely
strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the
collective community live in each person who throws himself
wholeheartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between
society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the
individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a
superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas
and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he
is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the
collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to
have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse
could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en
masse, such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good,
such as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it
have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have
permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as
conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of
offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the
slogan of "democracy," it would reach the highest level ever known of
collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the
education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and
beauty in the nation's communal living, are alien to our traditional
ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it
is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a
political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival
group has meant, throughout all history - war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term "herd" in connection
with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first
principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of which we
all live, move, and have our being. Ethnologists are generally agreed
that human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not
as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in fact the
original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal
individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes of men
are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization
where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes
remain strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and
the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of
organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest
primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different
species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious
evolutionary history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out.
This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to
coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself
threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men
become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war.

Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of
massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on.
In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce
concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion.
Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up
into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which
wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the
conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex instinct is enormously
oversupplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the
gregarious impulse is enormously oversupplied for the work of
protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite
enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of
others, to be able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight
malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not
content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that
like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life.
So that all human progress, all novelty, and nonconformity, must be
carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd instinct which
drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority.
Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows
little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand
out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more
fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes
to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because
when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this
feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very
greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the
individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by
conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the
crowd. While even if you do not get any access of power by thinking
and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at
least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of
protection.

Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual
- the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience - this
gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it
to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its
mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to
the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little
group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which
the State - the organization of the entire herd, the entire
collectivity - is founded on and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element
of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for
protection, sends one's desire back to the father and mother, with
whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for
nothing that one's State is still thought of as Father or Motherland,
that one's relation toward it is conceived in terms of family
affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger
have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves
again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense
Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in
Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the
many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more
tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived
in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense
obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve
faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of
them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they
lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the
child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx of power. On most
people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and
upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have
had bequeathed to them or have assumed the responsibilities of
governing. The State provides the convenientest of symbols under which
these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of
governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood.
They continue to direct industry and government and all the
institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own
conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned
from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants
of society, or something greater than they - the State. The man who
moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in
the war management industrial service in Washington does not
apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique.
But psychically, what a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not
only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is
directly proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice
that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he
retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of command.

From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if
the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real
loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic
sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the
traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide,
as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for
this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it
gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to
an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you
draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed,
and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and
act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a
truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal
symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of
your definite action and ideas.

The members of the working classes, that portion at least which does
not identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate
it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of
the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant
classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in
wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never
having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have
been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial regime of the last
century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but
they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without
that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their
"betters." They live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which,
though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a
system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own,
and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest
voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled
intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their
direction. From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a
change. But into the military enterprise they go, not with those
hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully
feeds, but with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in
the industrial enterprise.

From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class
sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations
of power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human
impulses - gregariousness and parent-regression - endow it with all
the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely
just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in
the class division of his society. A country at war - particularly our
own country at war - does not act as a purely homogeneous herd. The
significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its primitive
intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials of
intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without
impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a
long historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd. The
nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of groups
representing the cooperation and similar feeling of men on all sorts
of planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. In
every modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of economic
classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests -
bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions according to
power and function, and even their interweaving, such as those more
highly skilled workers who habitually identify themselves with the
owning and the significant classes and strive to raise themselves to
the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and manners.
Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though
weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups
which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging
tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their
herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols.
There are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small
sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci
for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, and the same person
may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes.
Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction or
another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the
necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail, in a political
campaign, that his party shall triumph.

To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all these smaller herds
offer resistance. To the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from
the threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation,
the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course,
which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which
they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all
practical purposes citizens of their new country. They keep alive
their ethnic traditions more as a luxury than anything. Indeed these
traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with some
still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for
freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too
invidious policy of Americanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in
time of war, these ethnic elements which have any traditional
connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may
have little real sympathy with the enemy's cause, are naturally
lukewarm to the herd-feeling of the nation which goes back to State
traditions in which they have no share. But to the natives imbued with
State-feeling, any such resistance or apathy is intolerable. This herd-
feeling, this newly awakened consciousness of the State, demands
universality. The leaders of the significant classes, who feel most
intensely this State compulsion, demand a 100 percent Americanism,
among 100 percent of the population. The State is a jealous God and
will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one, and all
feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic
militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-
feeling.

Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport
between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within
outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without.
The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the
heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white
terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists,
socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against
all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the
enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the
bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The
revolutionary proletariat shows more resistance to this unification,
is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as
the I.W.W., is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that it is
a symptom, not a cause, and its persecution increases the disaffection
of labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening it.

But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not take
into consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led by its
significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain of its impulses
which have had all too little exercise in the past. It is getting
certain satisfactions, and the actual conduct of the war or the
condition of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new
forms of virtue and power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown
conclusively that the persecution of slightly disaffected elements
actually increased enormously the difficulties of production and the
organization of the war technique, it would be found that public
policy would scarcely change. The significant classes must have their
pleasure in hunting down and chastising everything that they feel
instinctively to be not imbued with the current State enthusiasm,
though the State itself be actually impeded in its efforts to carry
out those objects for which they are passionately contending. The best
proof of this is that with a pursuit of plotters that has continued
with ceaseless vigilance ever since the beginning of the war in
Europe, the concrete crimes unearthed and punished have been fewer
than those prosecutions for the mere crime of opinion or the
expression of sentiments critical of the State or the national policy.
The punishment for opinion has been far more ferocious and
unintermittent than the punishment of pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable
Anglo-Saxon Americans who were freer of pacifist or socialist
utterance than the State-obsessed ruling public opinion, received
heavier penalties and even greater opprobrium, in many instances, than
the definitely hostile German plotter. A public opinion which, almost
without protest, accepts as just, adequate, beautiful, deserved, and
in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, a
sentence of twenty years in prison for mere utterances, no matter what
they may be, shows itself to be suffering from a kind of social
derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis, that deserves
analysis and comprehension.

On our entrance into the war, there were many persons who predicted
exactly this derangement of values, who feared lest democracy suffer
more at home from an America at war than could be gained for democracy
abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The question whether the
American nation would act like an enlightened democracy going to war
for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd, has been
decisively answered. The record is written and cannot be erased.
History will decide whether the terrorization of opinion and the
regimentation of life were justified under the most idealistic of
democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation
had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous
regard to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather to
adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy and
of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and
ferocity of punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For
its former unconsciousness and disrespect of the State ideal, the
nation apparently paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other
extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of
minorities that there is no artificiality in interpreting the progress
of the war in terms of the herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out
into the strongest relief the true characteristics of the State and
its intimate alliance with war. It provided for the enemies of war and
the critics of the State the most telling arguments possible. The new
passion for the State ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged
forces that threaten very materially to reform the State. It has shown
those who are really determined to end war that the problem is not the
mere simple one of finishing a war that will end war.

For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so
out of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on, perhaps against all
its interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of values.
It is States that make wars and not nations, and the very thought and
almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of the State. Not
for centuries have nations made war; in fact the only historical
example of nations making war is the great barbarian invasions into
southern Europe, the invasions of Russia from the East, and perhaps
the sweep of Islam through northern Africa into Europe after
Mohammed's death. And the motivations for such wars were either the
restless expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious
fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements could scarcely be called
wars at all, for war implies an organized people drilled and led: in
fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such
organization, such huge conflicts between nations - nations, that is,
as cultural groups - have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to
assume that for centuries in Europe there would have been any
possibility of a people en masse (with their own leaders, and not with
the leaders of their duly constituted State) rising up and overflowing
their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the
Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled
freedom, and, moreover, they were clearly directed not against other
peoples, but against the autocratic governments that were combining to
crush the Revolution. There is no instance in history of a genuinely
national war. There are instances of national defenses, among
primitive civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against
intolerable invasion by neighboring despots or oppression. But war, as
such, cannot occur except in a system of competing States, which have
relations with each other through the channels of diplomacy.

War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except
in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration,
nations organized as a federation of free communities, nations
organized in any way except that of a political centralization of a
dynasty, or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly
make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for
conflict, but they would be unable to muster the concentrated force to
make war effective. There might be all sorts of amateur marauding,
there might be guerrilla expeditions of group against group, but there
could not be that terrible war en masse of the national State, that
exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse
of the national life and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide,
which is modern war.

It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and
not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is
a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of
herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War
cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military
establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an
immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long
tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally
joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly
against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure,
that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take
measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not
the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its
present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the
passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing
forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State's chief function
is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its
energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It
devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the
vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of
life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State's chief
function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and
developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And
this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy,
but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State
in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk
of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military
pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing
processes of the national life.

All this organization of death-dealing energy and technique is not a
natural but a very sophisticated process. Particularly in modern
nations, but also all through the course of modern European history,
it could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands of no
other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial,
political group. If the demand for military organization and a
military establishment seems to come not from the officers of the
State but from the public, it is only that it comes from the State-
obsessed portion of the public, those groups which feel most keenly
the State ideal. And in this country we have had evidence all too
indubitable how powerless the pacifically minded officers of State may
be in the face of a State obsession of the significant classes. If a
powerful section of the significant classes feels more intensely the
attitudes of the State, then they will most infallibly mold the
Government in time to their wishes, bring it back to act as the
embodiment of the State which it pretends to be. In every country we
have seen groups that were more loyal than the king - more patriotic
than the Government - the Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in
Prussia, l'Action Française in France, our patrioteers in America.
These groups exist to keep the steering wheel of the State straight,
and they prevent the nation from ever veering very far from the State
ideal.

Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse only
of this class. The other classes, left to themselves, have too many
necessities and interests and ambitions, to concern themselves with so
expensive and destructive a game. But the State-obsessed group is
either able to get control of the machinery of the State or to
intimidate those in control, so that it is able through use of the
collective force to regiment the other grudging and reluctant classes
into a military program. State idealism percolates down through the
strata of society; capturing groups and individuals just in proportion
to the prestige of this dominant class. So that we have the herd
actually strung along between two extremes, the militaristic patriots
at one end, who are scarcely distinguishable in attitude and animus
from the most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and unskilled labor
groups, which entirely lack the State sense. But the State acts as a
whole, and the class that controls governmental machinery can swing
the effective action of the herd as a whole. The herd is not actually
a whole, emotionally. But by an ingenious mixture of cajolery,
agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an
effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are
told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of
their own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country's
welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and
punished with the most horrid penalties; and under a most
indescribable confusion of democratic pride and personal fear they
submit to the destruction of their livelihood if not their lives, in a
way that would formerly have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be
incredible.

In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings.
The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push toward
military unity. Any difference with that unity turns the whole vast
impulse toward crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the
Government, backed by the significant classes and those who in every
locality, however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds
against the outlaws, regardless of their value to the other
institutions of the nation, or to the effect their persecution may
have on public opinion. The herd becomes divided into the hunters and
the hunted, and war enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a
sport as well.

It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each
other, nor in the strictest sense is it nations that fight each other.
Much has been said to the effect that modern wars are wars of whole
peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is regimented
and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this
does not mean that it is the country qua country which is fighting. It
is the country organized as a State that is fighting, and only as a
State would it possibly fight. So literally it is States which make
war on each other and not peoples. Governments are the agents of
States, and it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting
truest to form in the interests of the great State ideal they
represent. There is no case known in modern times of the people being
consulted in the initiation of a war. The present demand for
"democratic control" of foreign policy indicates how completely, even
in the most democratic of modern nations, foreign policy has been the
secret private possession of the executive branch of the Government.

However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may be
in all that concerns the internal administration of a country's
political affairs, in international relations it has never been
possible to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly
mechanical ratifier of the Executive's will. The formality by which
Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality.
Before such a declaration can take place, the country will have been
brought to the very brink of war by the foreign policy of the
Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one more
fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course of
action, will have been taken without either the people or its
representatives being consulted or expressing its feeling. When the
declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the
Parliament or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the
course of history, without repudiating what has been representing
itself in the eyes of the other States as the symbol and interpreter
of the nation's will and animus. To repudiate an Executive at that
time would be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the
country had been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the
country with an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its
Government to commit it to gigantic national enterprises in which it
had no heart. In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most
democratic States represents the common man and not the significant
classes who most strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully
sustain the foreign policy which it understands even less than it
would care for if it understood, and will vote almost unanimously for
an incalculable war, in which the nation may be brought well nigh to
ruin. That is why the referendum which was advocated by some people as
a test of American sentiment in entering the war was considered even
by thoughtful democrats to be something subtly improper. The die had
been cast. Popular whim could only derange and bungle monstrously the
majestic march of State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the
world. The irresistible State ideal got hold of the bowels of men.
Whereas up to this time, it had been irreproachable to be neutral in
word and deed, for the foreign policy of the State had so decided it,
henceforth it became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The
Middle West, which had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of
neutrality, became in a few months just as soddenly bellicose, and in
its zeal for witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within gave
precedence to no section of the country. The herd-mind followed
faithfully the State-mind and, the agitation for a referendum being
soon forgotten, the country fell into the universal conclusion that,
since its Congress had formally declared the war, the nation itself
had in the most solemn and universal way devised and brought on the
entire affair.

Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter
were perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly
declared will of a majority of the nation. The herd coalescence of
opinion which became inevitable the moment the State had set flowing
the war attitudes became interpreted as a prewar popular decision, and
disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously
antisocial act. So that the State, which had vigorously resisted the
idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of course, with entire
success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign policy, had
the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to
the retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken
place. When once a country has lapped up these State attitudes, its
memory fades; it conceives itself not as merely accepting, but of
having itself willed, the whole policy and technique of war. The
significant classes, with their trailing satellites, identify
themselves with the State, so that what the State, through the agency
of the Government, has willed, this majority conceives itself to have
willed.

All of which goes to show that the State represents all the
autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social
group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the
modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the
State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of
sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of
services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover. With
the ravages of democratic ideas, however, the modern republic cannot
go to war under the old conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing
belligerency. If a successful animus for war requires a renaissance of
State ideals, they can only come back under democratic forms, under
this retrospective conviction of democratic control of foreign policy,
democratic desire for war, and particularly of this identification of
the democracy with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may
be, however, is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the
Government's unreformed attitude on foreign policy. One of the first
demands of the more farseeing democrats in the democracies of the
Alliance was that secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have
been made possible by a web of secret agreements between States,
alliances that were made by Governments without the shadow of popular
support or even popular knowledge, and vague, half-understood
commitments that scarcely reached the stage of a treaty or agreement,
but which proved binding in the event. Certainly, said these
democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be avoided unless this poisonous
underground system of secret diplomacy is destroyed, this system by
which a nation's power, wealth, and manhood may be signed away like a
blank check to an allied nation to be cashed in at some future crisis.
Agreements which are to affect the lives of whole peoples must be made
between peoples and not by Governments, or at least by their
representatives in the full glare of publicity and criticism.

Such a demand for "democratic control of foreign policy" seemed
axiomatic. Even if the country had been swung into war by steps taken
secretly and announced to the public only after they had been
consummated, it was felt that the attitude of the American State
toward foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must be
superseded in the new order. The American President himself, the
liberal hope of the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world,
open diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived at. Did this mean
a genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State
functions from Government to people? Not at all. When the question
recently came to a challenge in Congress, and the implications of open
discussion were somewhat specifically discussed, and the
desirabilities frankly commended, the President let his disapproval be
known in no uncertain way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being
a State idealist, and whenever democratic aspirations swung ideals too
far out of the State orbit, he could be counted on to react
vigorously. Here was a clear case of conflict between democratic
idealism and the very crux of the concept of the State. However
unthinkingly he might have been led on to encourage open diplomacy in
his liberalizing program, when its implication was made vivid to him,
he betrayed how mere a tool the idea had been in his mind to
accentuate America's redeeming role. Not in any sense as a serious
pragmatic technique had he thought of a genuinely open diplomacy. And
how could he? For the last stronghold of State power is foreign
policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts most
concentratedly as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of
aggressive-power, acts with freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy,
the State is most itself. States, with reference to each other, may be
said to be in a continual state of latent war. The "armed truce," a
phrase so familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the
normal relation of States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy
is a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and
intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would
have to gain more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while
the States are recuperating from conflicts in which they have
exhausted themselves. It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the
worn-out bullies as they rise from the ground and slowly restore their
strength to begin fighting again. If diplomacy had been a moral
equivalent for war, a higher stage in human progress, an inestimable
means of making words prevail instead of blows, militarism would have
broken down and given place to it. But since it is a mere temporary
substitute, a mere appearance of war's energy under another form, a
surrogate effect is almost exactly proportioned to the armed force
behind it. When it fails, the recourse is immediate to the military
technique whose thinly veiled arm it has been. A diplomacy that was
the agency of popular democratic forces in their non-State
manifestations would be no diplomacy at all. It would be no better
than the Railway or Education commissions that are sent from one
country to another with rational constructive purpose. The State,
acting as a diplomatic-military ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it
must act arbitrarily and autocratically in time of war, it must act in
time of peace in this particular role where it acts as a unit. Unified
control is necessarily autocratic control.

Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore a contradiction in
terms. Open discussion destroys swiftness and certainty of action. The
giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains his full ideal of the
State at the same time that he desires to eliminate war. He wishes to
make the world safe for democracy as well as safe for diplomacy. When
the two are in conflict, his clear political insight, his idealism of
the State, tells him that it is the naïver democratic values that must
be sacrificed. The world must primarily be made safe for diplomacy.
The State must not be diminished.

What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the
more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our
hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact
enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a
certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking
and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of
political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But
the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and
from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the
breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war - or at
least, its significant classes - considers that it derives its
authority and its purpose from the idea of the State. Nation and State
are scarcely differentiated, and the concrete, practical, apparent
facts are sunk in the symbol. We reverence not our country but the
flag. We may criticize ever so severely our country, but we are
disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform
that make men's heart beat high and fill them with noble emotions, not
the thought of and pious hopes for America as a free and enlightened
nation.

It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the
flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American
flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of
the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but
solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige
and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military
achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its
intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag
is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and
holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation's patriotic history
is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health
and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag,
we are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the
herd organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its
prowess and its mystical herd strength.

Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has been
granted autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are
scarcely able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has been
authoritatively declared that the horrid penalties against seditious
opinion must not be construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is,
partisan criticism of the Administration. A distinction is made
between the Administration and the Government. It is quite accurately
suggested by this attitude that the Administration is a temporary band
of partisan politicians in charge of the machinery of Government,
carrying out the mystical policies of State. The manner in which they
operate this machinery may be freely discussed and objected to by
their political opponents. The Governmental machinery may also be
legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What may not be discussed
or criticized is the mystical policy itself or the motives of the
State in inaugurating such a policy. The President, it is true, has
made certain partisan distinctions between candidates for office on
the ground of support or nonsupport of the Administration, but what he
means was really support or nonsupport of the State policy as
faithfully carried out by the Administration. Certain of the
Administration measures were devised directly to increase the health
of the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others
were concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to
oppose the State and was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second
was to oppose fallible human judgment, and was therefore, though to be
depreciated, not to be wholly interpreted as political suicide.

The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so
carefully observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as
the seat of authority should be confused with the State or the mystic
source of authority. You cannot very well injure a mystical idea which
is the State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of
Government. So that the two become identified in the public mind, and
any contempt for or opposition to the workings of the machinery of
Government is considered equivalent to contempt for the sacred State.
The State, it is felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, and
public emotion rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any
criticism of the form of Government a crime.

The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully
shown by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and
Navy as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case
of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to be
far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than the
isolated and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent
recruiting. But in the tradition of the State ideal, such industrial
interference with national policy is not identified as a crime against
the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally
as an impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those
obscure seats of the herd mind which dictate the identity of crime and
fix their proportional punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the
very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious lifeblood. To
paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty of
the State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a
crime equal to a successful strike. The will is deemed sufficient.
Even though the individual in his effort to impede recruiting should
utterly and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the
wrath of the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does
not try any overt action, but merely utters sentiments that may
incidentally in the most indirect way cause someone to refrain from
enlisting, he is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask whether
any pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is
enough that the will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is
not deemed too much for such sacrilege.

Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human
reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by
the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the
classes which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme
of health and vigor in the reaction of the State to its nonfriends.

Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the
State. For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol, and
it can only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The modern
State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men
desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life,
property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been
devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism
with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of
our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of
security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and
development of its original functions, and not because at any time men
or classes in the full possession of their insight and intelligence
have desired that it be so. It is very important that we should
occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that ex post facto idealism
by which we throw a glamour of rationalization over what is, and
pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we have personally
invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary
institutions which we see around us. Things are what they are, and
come down to us with all their thick encrustations of error and
malevolence. Political philosophy can delight us with fantasy and
convince us who need illusion to live that the actual is a fair and
approximate copy - full of failings, of course, but approximately
sound and sincere - of that ideal society which we can imagine
ourselves as creating. From this it is a step to the tacit assumption
that we have somehow had a hand in its creation and are responsible
for its maintenance and sanctity.

Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into
society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest
hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls
in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on
earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network
of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and
interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have
emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we
might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social
institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and
class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between
ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment.
We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our
society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the
group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of
reason, and the adventure of beauty.

Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is
given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given.
Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as
much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is,
therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in
the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed
before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us
unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there
is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once
the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest
and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling
class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State
thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is
wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to
capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and
turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their
privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the
sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain
in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are
obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all
of us. . . .

RANDOLPH BOURNE
1918