done to his fundamental conviction: that we have persisted in treating the forms of Society as means to secure the happiness and welfare of individuals instead of acknowledging that they are themselves if not persons then greater and better than persons, with a life of their own to whose goodness it is the only privilege of individual citizens to contribute. It might in short be contended that the good of Society does not consist in the good of its members: and that just as the Absolute experience may on some views be wholly good though made up of finite experiences which are partly evil, so the imperfections of individual lives need not mar the Excellence of the Society in which they are members. When it is hard to affirm definitely that such a view exists, it is still easy to find the germs of it. The absolute devotion of the Japanese to their fatherland as personified by the Emperor roused the universal admiration of Europe some years ago: and it was only the supreme instance of a patriotic devotion which equally in the armed camp of Germany and in the free-thinking Republic of France has for years resisted with apparent success the propaganda of an international movement; a national spirit that wins through the autocracy of Russia with no more difficulty than through the most democratic of Anglo-Saxon countries. But the nation-states of modern Europe certainly do not obtain more ungrudging devotion than the small citystates of antiquity. The Church has commanded a fidelity greater than any of them. And to pass finally to much smaller groups, what more favourite topic at a school or college dinner than to contrast the permanence and greatness of the institution with the short life and the weak powers of its transient members who are there

to celebrate it? Must we say that there is nothing but sentimental rhetoric behind all the songs of patriotism?

The true value of these various organizations I shall certainly not deny, and later I shall treat of it at length. But for the moment it seems important to guard against the exaggerations of a devotion that in itself is admirable. Neither in the State nor in the Church nor any lesser grouping can you find a unit of value higher than the individual personality.

§ 2. The Personality of Corporations

FIRST, let us consider the associations lesser than the State itself. Discussion has recently centred on a question which in the first instance is legal, but has wider implications that ought here to be considered. Are these associations persons or not? It is clear that on the line of argument taken above against theories of any absolute mind which included in itself all lesser finite minds, great hesitation ought to be felt in ascribing personality to what prima facie would appear to be only a collection of persons bound together by some.common purpose or interest. But the lawyer will point out that a college or a club can be summoned in the courts for the same kind of offences for which private individuals may be prosecuted. If it is possible to convict a corporate body for defamation where actual malice had to be proved, it is plain that the courts consider the intentions of a society in the same way that they might consider those of an individual.1 But might this be described as a legal fiction? Of recent years there has been a strong movement in England to follow the lead of Dr. Giercke and deny that there is any real fiction at

1 Professor Geldart's Inaugural Lecture on Legal Personality, see p. 7.

all the facts which the 'fiction' is supposed to cover could not, it is urged, be described in any more appropriate language.

It must be noticed first that personality is treated here according to its original use or as among later thinkers Hegel took it, to denote the basis of legal rights and duties. The corporation can sue and be sued it has a property of its own distinct from the properties of its members: a mind of its own and a will of its own which affect the legal nature of its transactions: it has rights even against its own members and cannot in some cases be broken up by them at will.2 If these actual facts of legal responsibilities and privileges can best be represented for the lawyer by calling corporations persons', well and good. It must still be admitted. that when we describe individual human beings as persons we are not simply looking to the legal status which is the basis of the lawyer's use of the term: and the further facts we have then in mind, namely the uniqueness of the individual self-consciousness, have no analogue at all in the association, which is never wholly exempt from the taunt that 'corporations have neither a body to kick nor a soul to save, and so are exempt both in this world and the next from the most powerful sanctions of good conduct'. Without pursuing the question of responsibility for the moment, we must at

1 See the case quoted above: or again the remark of Mr. Justice Neville, which, according to Professor Geldart, 'has gone far to throw overboard a theory which would make the directors of a company the mere agents of a fictitious something entirely distinct from themselves. "The board of directors are the brains and the only brains of the company which is the body, and the company can and does act only through them."' 2 Geldart, p. 11: 'No one will be bold enough to say that the property of a university or church or city is held in shares by the members of such a body.'

least deny that personality for the lawyer means just what it means for the moralist or the metaphysician. Further when the lawyer debates whether to concede to corporate bodies a real or only a fictitious personality, the question really agitating him is how to define the province of the central State so as to give it an adequate but not too grasping or tyrannous a control over these subordinate societies. Declare their personality to be only a fiction and you make them perhaps too rigidly dependent on the author of the fiction. The legislator has made such a person and may unmake him. Theoretically no doubt the same might be said of private individuals so far as they interest the lawyer: law might make slavery once again permissible: but practically no doubt in modern communities the mere fact of birth confers on the members of the State rights that the legislature has to acknowledge. The sting of the fiction theory lies in the fact that it would be a definite act of the sovereign which gave birth to the bodies thus raised to a fictitious personality, and the creature he produces must remain constituted as he chooses, with little or no power of spontaneous growth or development.1

Such questions become especially important in modern times in connexion with two of the most vital features in modern society-the Churches and the various trade organizations. The clash of opinion about their utility has here been reflected in lawyers' controversy about their legal status. Those who are strongly impressed by their essential importance in the

1 'If the personality of the Corporation is a legal fiction it will be the gift of the prince. It is not for you and me to force our fictions upon our neighbours. "Solus princeps fingit quod in rei veritate non est." All associations that the prince has not authorized thus become illegal.' (Maitland, Collected Papers, iii. 310.)

life of men have thought they detected behind the subtleties of prevalent legal doctrines an undue jealousy of all corporate bodies comprised within the Great Leviathan itself. Nor was this suspicion groundless. The watchword of the French anticlerical movement might have been taken from a legal pronouncement of the Radical Premier, M. Emile Combes. 'There are, there can be, no rights except the right of the State, and there is, and there can be, no other authority than the authority of the Republic.' In these words M. Combes was only echoing the language of 1792: 'A State that is truly free ought not to suffer within its bosom any corporation, not even such as, being dedicated to public instruction, have merited well of the country.' It is not without significance that in the country where the absolute supremacy of the central authority was so lucidly and unequivocally stated, there has grown up a body of political doctrines which seek the salvation of Society in leagues of producers working as far as may be autonomously and free from the curbing influence of State bureaucracy.2

If then the value of such minor organizations is allowed, and if it is believed that to possess their fullest value they must be granted powers of spontaneous expansion, a legal theory that blocks the way of such growth stands naturally condemned and must be revised. The reason that some lawyers wish to escape. from the fiction theory is simply that it has led to an exaggerated centralization of authority and a consequent jealous

1 Quoted in Dr. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, p. 56.

2 It is true, however, that when Syndicalists have abolished the State, they are apt to reintroduce it in the form of some general committee of Trade Unions. The Syndicalists' Utopia of MM. Pataud and Pouget ('Comment nous ferons la révolution') is significant in this respect.