concerned with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid. If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}
Of all the influences which tend to rob the citizen of the sense of his birthright, perhaps one of the strongest, and yet the most subtle, is that of officialism. It seems inevitable that the enormously complex public services which are necessary in the modern State should set up a barrier between the private citizen and the official, whereby the true relation between them is obscured. The official loses his grasp of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a hostile institution, against which he has to defend himself, although it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State in the matter of tax-paying, it is no crime for the State to defraud him in excessive charges. Considered in the light of the fundamental relation of citizen and State, it seems incredible that in a democratic country it is possible for flourishing establishments to exist the sole business of which is to save the private individual from being defrauded by the tax-gathering bureaucracy. This is but a single and rather extreme example of the far-stretching segregation effected by the official machine. The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity. If the official machine through its utmost parts