and to destroy that local fixity which, with the lower class in particular, is one of the main guarantees of respectability. Perhaps the necessary course of the business may require that a portion of those employed should be denied their Sabbath rest. The workmen are remunerated for these moral sacrifices in gold, upon a scale which, as compared with the actual wants of persons similarly educated, supplies a rapid and disproportionate increase to their means, and thereby greatly increases their temptations, while there is no counteractive provision usually made to neutralise these undoubtedly noxious influences.

86. Such things are but too true, real, and practical. The evidence of facts may, and that soon, supersede the necessity of arguments to prove that such a disposal of human labour, however apparently productive, secretly undermines the foundations of society. It is enough for my purpose to have shown, that if the mind and conscience of our own time were sufficiently harmonised and enlightened to admit of adequate securities for uniformly annexing a provision for religious ordinances to the schemes of temporal enterprise and pecuniary aggrandisement, we should probably avoid many kinds of evil which are now engendered among us, on a fearful scale, by the separation of the two, as respects a large portion of our population; and therefore, in assenting to the proposition that there are some combinations of men to which, at the present time in particular, it is impossible to apply the principle of collective religion, it seems to me most

becoming and rational to do so, not with any selfgratulatory admiration of this feature in our character or condition, but rather with shame and deprecation of the Divine displeasure.

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87. I return then to the position, that, as the nation fulfils the great conditions of a person, a real unity of being, of deliberating, of acting, of suffering; and these in a definite manner, and upon an extended scale, and with immense moral functions to discharge, and influences to exercise, both upon its members and extrinsically therefore it has that kind of clear, large, and conscious responsibility which can alone be met by its specifically professing a religion, and offering, through its organ the State, that worship which shall publicly sanctify its acts. That which, by its governing organ, it professes specially, it must encourage and maintain throughout its inferior members as a part of such profession itself.

88. But some minds are staggered by the objection, that a nation, like other forms of human incorporation, is not immortal; that no retribution and no reward await it in a future state; or, as it is sometimes said, that corporations have no souls. But corporations have souls quite as much as they have bodies, and it will hardly be held that they have neither. They have souls; they have deliberative minds; they have personality, and with it responsibility. Grant that public personalities are limited to the sphere of this world: this does not destroy their moral obligations. Suppose the doctrine of a future state, as it respects

individuals, were disproved, the foundations of morality would remain; because they in no way depend upon the hypothesis of an unlimited continuance, but are laid in the actual relations between the Creator and the creature, and as long as those relations endure they subsist. It is true indeed that their subjective appreciation in our minds, defective as it now is, would be, if we may imagine such a case, still further and miserably enfeebled; but objectively they would only be affected in so far as anticipation is one of their constituent parts. Surely it is impossible to maintain a doctrine so extravagant as that no obligation can be real which is not eternal. Indeed, if it were held at all, it might as well be applied to things or beings which have had a beginning as to those which have an end. Of course the responsibility of a moral or public person terminates upon the individuals who enter into its composition, as the health or disease of a body takes effect upon the members.

89. But inasmuch as consequences may afford a powerful stimulus to the performance of duty, it has been observed, that prosperity more commonly crowns virtue, and adversity more closely dogs the course of sin, in the case of states, than in that of individuals. In particular instances the results of virtue, under the conditions of this world, are uncertain; but as a general rule they tend decisively to prosperity. Now, individuals are subject to the contingency because the whole tenor of their life may be determined by one or more particular acts; but in communities it is the

effect of average practice which is most surely and permanently felt, and they therefore reap the advantage of the rule in favour of good deeds upon a large scale. So that in some points of view the doctrine of retribution has perhaps a more stringent application to states than to private persons, and thereby makes up for its limitation to the bounds of the present world.*

90. I offer further some incidental remarks, which arise upon a comparison of the several personalities of the individual, the family, and the state. The personality of the family differs from the last in this respect, that it is less permanently sustained by a collective action, as from its sphere it is capable of management without formality of proceedings and written codes. Its relations are more securely founded on an immediate reciprocity of affections. The application to it of the principle of collective religion is far easier than in the case of the state, and for a reason quite irreconcilable with the utilitarian theories; that the maintenance of its specific compact much less requires it, and that that warm confiding attachment of its members to one another and to its heads, which can better dispense with the use of its sanctions, do also prepare the way for their ready acknowledgment and acceptance. In the State neither the principle of affection is so strong, nor that of dependence so determinate, as to obviate obstructions to the acknowledgment of the national religion; but the need

*More's Hints, i. ch. 18.

of the blending and consolidating power of a spiritual principle is thereby increased, and the general obligation is therefore enhanced in proportion to this necessity.

91. But if, on the other hand, we compare the personality of states with that of individuals, we perceive that it differs in point of the tendency to entail moral obligations chiefly in this particular, that, while every individual of adult years has a full free agency and responsibility, the composition of states and their share of moral personality are susceptible of infinite degree. The personality of all states is imperfect in detail, though in essential conditions entire, and cumbrous and circuitous in operation, as well as difficult to be realised in the discursive understanding, when compared with that of the individual. Even when they are ordered in the manner most according to nature, there is much in the community that the governing energy cannot control; it is, as it were, imperfectly projected; there are many practices of its own members which from impotence it is constrained to tolerate, though injurious alike to itself and to morality; but there is nothing in the individual for which he is not at all times fully responsible, and no moral practice alien to duty which he is permitted to tolerate.

92. And if the principle of state personality and conscience be liable to modifications even in cases where the form of political association is single and integral, it follows as a matter of course that it is yet further restricted in various degrees in those instances