THE HUMAN NATURE AND MORALS OF THE CASE

it, in fact, nonsense, is the same fallacy which dominates the quotation that I have made from Professor Spenser Wilkinson's book, "Britain at Bay"—namely, the approximation of a State to a person, the assumption that the political delimitation coincides with the economic and moral delimitation, that in short a State is the embodiment of "the whole people's conception of what is true, etc." A State is nothing of the sort. Take the British Empire. This State embodies not a homogeneous conception, but a series of often absolutely contradictory conceptions of "what is true, etc."; it embodies the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Copt, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Pagan conceptions of right and truth. The fact which vitiates the whole of this conception of a State is that the frontiers which define the State do not coincide with the conception of any of those things which the London Morning Post critic has enumerated; there is no such thing as British morality as opposed to French or German morality, or art or industry. One may, indeed, talk of an English conception of life, because that is a conception of life peculiar to England, but it would be opposed to the conception of life in other parts of the same State, in Ireland, in Scotland, in India, in Egypt, in Jamaica. And what is true of England is true of all the great modern States. Every one of them includes conceptions absolutely opposed to other conceptions in the same State, but many of them absolutely agree with conceptions in foreign States. The British State includes, in Ireland, a Catholic conception in cordial agreement with the Catholic conception in Italy, but in cordial disagreement