growth. Its whole purpose is the alleviation of human suffering, the increase of human happiness and the furtherance of human welfare. Though developed parallel with the national movement, it is a wholesome antidote, for it is inspired by an ideal which is infinitely broader and recognized by most as higher. It is the good not of this or that nation, but of the whole human race, indeed of all living things. The change which has taken place in the last two hundred years, and particularly in the last century, is quite striking. The eighteenth century, compared with the present, was a brutally hard age. After the rebellion of 1745, Londoners enjoyed a sight from which our eyes would turn in disgust, heads rotting on Temple Bar. The anti-slavery campaign did succeed at the end of the century in converting the younger Pitt. But this super-Lloyd George, for all his speeches in the House, could do nothing. Another plague spot was the condition of the prisons and asylums, whose inmates were treated not like human beings but like brute beasts. Clarkson raised his voice again and again for reform, but he had less influence than John the Baptist. The criminal code of the day was unutterably harsh. Excessive punishments were imposed for the least crimes. Women were publicly burned for murder or treason. In practice they were considerately strangled beforehand; but this did not detract from the spectacle. The industrial revolution led to the wholesale sacrifice of human life on the altar of commercial gain. Large masses of the working class were huddled together under conditions which threatened to ruin both health and morals. Men, women and little children were forced to work inhumanly long hours in an environment which was brutalizing. In the textile industry, for example, the workers had to operate in an atmosphere kept artificially moist by a constant spray, which made their hands a mass of sores. The conditions prevailing in the factories at the close of the eighteenth and at the opening of the nineteenth permanently injured the physique of the working class. To-day there is a marked difference in size between the lower and the middle classes in England. It was not until many years after 1800 that the humanitarian movement began to bear any appreciable fruit. The slave trade was abolished by

Britain early in the century, but it was only after the Reform Bill that slavery itself was done away with. Inhuman laws and prison conditions have been largely reformed and now, instead of hanging men for petty crimes, we question whether we should hang them at all. Justice has been purged of its strong flavour of vengeance and become reformative as far as possible. Legislation and the wise vision of factory owners have transformed working conditions. No longer is the wage. earner a mere living tool; he is a man. The human element in industry has been more and more emphasized. Another tremendous stride in advance has been in the field of medicine. What has been the driving force? It has been this very humanitarian movement, the desire for the preservation and improvement of human life. As never before, we are living in a keen atmosphere of social reform. This is one of the most hopeful signs of the present age. In so far as our feeling and our thought are focussed upon the problems of human suffering and human betterment, we are evolving an ideal that takes precedence over the limited and lower ideal of national welfare.

Partly due to this humanitarian movement, and partly to the emphasis laid by modern economic evolution upon material development, the place of war in our social ideal is changing. Until recently, war was commonly regarded as a most glorious thing, and the profession of arms as one of the noblest. It was beneath the honour of a gentleman to soil his hands in trade, his dignity called him to enter the army, or the church, which by the way is militant. Even such a Christian poet as Tennyson glorified war. In his Maud, he proclaimed the regenerating influence, taking as his example one of the most miserable struggles in which modern England had engaged. But the last century has seen a great change. The disappearance of duelling was significant that the age-old instinct of fighting was ceasing to be sanctified by an ideal. The Crimean War was an epoch in the history of the public attitude toward the horrors of war. For the first time newspaper men were present on the field and reported to the public sitting comfortably at home the ghastly conditions under which its soldiers fought and suffered and died. This blew up a great storm

of indignation and precipitated a parliamentary investigation. Then followed the Civil War to the south of us, the war which inspired the pungent definition that 'War is Hell'. It is often said that the old ideal survived strongly in Germany, and certainly before the late war there was quite a school of writers who openly preached war as an end in itself, and backed up their preaching by invoking its moral value. Too much attention has been paid to this campaign and not sufficient to one of the motives which inspired it. Bernhardi innocently gave the deep secret away, when he confessed that he was moved by the spread of the ideal of peace and was alarmed at the way the ideal of war was fading out in his own country. Thus, even in Germany, the tide of feeling was setting away from war. The late erperience of the world has carried this tendency very much further, till to-day there is a tremendous revulsion against war in general. The much vaunted glory of war has been buried deep in the mud of Flanders' fields.

Another interesting development, arising from the same causes, has been that of international opinion and morality. This was one of Machiavelli's first principles, and, despite many denunciations, it has stood as an important factor in the world of foreign affairs. This is not surprising. Private morality has been evolved by the frequent and intimate contact of individuals, but public or state morality has been far behind because there was no corresponding vital contact. But of late many see a change, as the economic shuttle is at work weaving the nations together, and as the leaven of the humanitarian movement has been unquestionably growing, and must not the corresponding morality grow with it? Is not state morality, which has for so long lagged behind private morality, now developing faster than the latter, and on the way to catch up with it? One of the most important things which modern states have to take into account is the opinion of the outside world. When Prussia leaped at the throat of France in 1870, her Chancellor sedulously cultivated the idea in England that France, not Prussia, was the aggressor. So even Bismarck paid tribute to the power of international opinion, and recognized that, while it may make mistakes in judgement, it will always be on the side of what seems to be justice. The whole

story of the Near Eastern Question in the nineteenth century teaches the same lesson. The international conscience of Europe was revolted by the atrocities of the Turk. At the close of the century, when the great British Empire made war upon a little nation in South Africa, the people of the Continent regarded the attack as a flagrant injustice. Britain suffered greatly thereby; her citizens were hardly safe from insult across the Channel, and she found herself isolated in a hostile world. Better examples still are to be found in the great war. Germany's defiance of international morality roused the whole world in arms against her. Then, as the war went on, there developed an unprecedented use of propaganda in many countries. Was not this an unparalleled recognition that the great judge is international opinion and morality? But of course this advance is very slow and we must not expect to arrive at Heaven to-morrow. In our eagerness, we might get off at the wrong station.

Finally, in line with all these tendencies undermining war, there has occurred something like a revolution in the realm of political theory. It is so recent that some are still horrified by it and few perhaps have seen its possible repercussion upon the problem of world peace. It is the challenge of the new theory of divided sovereignty to the old doctrine of single or undivided sovereignty. The old gospel, that the government is supreme over everything else within or without the state, is as old as the Roman Empire. But it was dissolved in the Middle Ages, reappearing only at the close of that period. Then came the Reformation which gave it renewed vigour. It has since presided more or less over the politics of the modern world until a clever French scholar and a young Englishman have pointed out that this theory is an idol with feet of clay.

Men organize themselves together in groups of various kinds, political, economic, social or religious, which all overlap, for every individual is a member of many groups. Each of these units or groups exists by reason of a common will. Every man has thus several wills; he is bound up in and owes allegiance to several bodies. The old exponents of the absolute sovereignty of the state saw this diversity and reconciled it

by an ingenious device, the Concession Theory. According to this, each of these bodies existed by the state conferring some of its power upon them or, in other words, their existence was by and through the state which was unique and supreme over all the others. It is a neat theory, but the new prophets of common sense condemn it as artificial and illogical. They insist that the state is only one of many corporate bodies, though a most important one. Many of these bodies appear despite the state, indeed in opposition to it. Each has its own. will and these may clash; and when they clash the strongest is bound to prevail. Now the strongest need need not always be the same; each in turn may be supreme according to the issue raised. Thus no will is absolutely free, no body absolute in its precedence over all the others; all are limited and each has its own sphere of freedom. There is therefore no absolute sovereignty, not even of the state.

An examination of facts supports the new theory. Neither externally nor internally is any state full master of its own actions. Every treaty to which a state becomes a party is a limitation upon that state's freedom of action. Those who deny this imply, whether they wish to or not, that treaties are mere 'scraps of paper'. At all times, moreover, the liberty of states is circumscribed by what other states think or do. Sometimes this restriction is felt rudely in the shock of war, but more commonly in the calculation of the effect which every proposed policy or step is likely to have upon the outside world. To-day neither Britain nor France is free to follow the foreign policies which they would desire; each is restrained by the will of the other. Internally also the state is far from being absolute master. In matters of religion it has to steer clear of the church if it wishes to retain the loyalty of its citizens. In the last century the Scottish Church was disrupted and the Free Church was formed as a result of such state interference in religious matters. This must not be ascribed to any peculiar Scottish stubbornness. In the established Church of England there has been long a refusal to recognize the competence of the greatest court in the land. More than once the Privy Council has been defied when it touched matters of religion. The resistance of the trades