The nature of the State has altered profoundly in the last century.  The later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries constituted a period of extreme individualism.  What were called “economic forces” had unrestricted play.  In the minds of such people as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer they superseded God.  People were no longer reproached for “flying in the face of Providence,” but for “flying in the face of Political Economy.”

In that state of freedom you got whatever you could in any way you could; you were not your neighbour’s keeper, and except that it interfered with the enterprise of pickpockets, burglars and forgers, and kept the dice loaded in favour of landlords and lawyers, the State stood aside from the great drama of human getting.  For industrialism and speculation the State’s guiding maxim was laissez faire.

The State is now far less aloof and far more constructive.  It is far more aware of itself and a common interest.  Germany has led the way from a system of individuals and voluntary associations in competition towards a new order of things, a completer synthesis.  This most modern State is far less a swarming conflict of businesses than a great national business.  It will emerge from this war much more so than it went in, and the thing is and will remain so plain and obvious that only the greediest and dullest people among the Pledged Allies will venture to disregard it.  The Allied nations, too, will have to rescue their economic future from individual grab and grip and chance.

The second consideration that forbids us to anticipate any parallelism of the history of 1915-45 with 1815-45 is the greater lucidity of the general mind, the fact that all Western Europe, down to the agricultural labourers, can read and write and does read newspapers and “get ideas.”  The explanation of economic and social processes that were mysterious to the elect a hundred years ago are now the commonplaces of the tap-room.  What happened then darkly, and often unconsciously, must happen in 1916-26 openly and controllably.  The current bankruptcy and liquidation and the coming reconstruction of the economic system of Europe will go on in a quite unprecedented amount of light.  We shall see and know what is happening much more clearly than anything of the kind has ever been seen before.

It is not only that people will have behind them, as a light upon what is happening, the experiences and discussions of a hundred years, but that the international situation will be far plainer than it has ever been.  This war has made Germany the central fact in all national affairs about the earth.  It is not going to destroy Germany, and it seems improbable that either defeat or victory, or any mixture of these, will immediately alter the cardinal fact of Germany’s organised aggressiveness.