100 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



On the whole, however, he has made progress. He has 

 undoubtedly made progress in knowledge, industrial arts, and 

 military discipline. He has improved his surroundings — made 

 them more favourable to his self-development. The easier, 

 ruder forms of social life must have preceded the more com- 

 plex and polished forms. Modern political communities of 

 the advanced type have been evolved out of much simpler 

 associations of human beings. But the progress has always 

 been partial. There has never been, nor is there now, an 

 advance— certainly not an equal advance — of the whole race 

 of man. As a matter of fact, we find the more advanced por- 

 tions of mankind grouped in well-defined entities, called States. 

 What does this term "State" denote? Unfortunately, the 

 word is used somewhat loosely. It signifies sometimes the 

 government — that is, the governing authorities, in contra- 

 distinction to the governed. Sometimes it denotes the go- 

 verned as opposed to the government. A common usage 

 makes the word stand for the secular authorities as dis- 

 tinguished from the ecclesiastical. Yet another usage makes 

 the word denote the nation as a subject of government. This 

 variable usage is the more to be regretted because the term 

 stands for an essential conception of political science. The 

 State may be defined as a large group of men, occupying a con- 

 siderable area of the earth's surface, speaking for the most part 

 the same language, and united under a single government. 

 Professor Amos, in his book on the " Science of Politics," says, 

 "The State, in the modern acceptation of the term, carries with 

 it the ideas of territorial limitation, of population, past, present, 

 and to come, and of organization for the purposes of govern- 

 ment." In Canada and the United States of America we see 

 a very extensive territory, inhabited by men of the same race 

 and speaking the same language, who yet do not form a State 

 because they lack political unity. 



Altogether different from our conception was the Greek 

 conception of a State. "There was in the Greek mind," says 

 Professor Freeman, " a distinct idea of a Greek nation, united 

 by common origin, speech, religion,, and civilisation. 

 But that the whole Greek nation, or so much of it as formed 

 a continuous or nearly continuous territory, could be united 

 into one political community never came into the mind of 

 any Greek statesman or Greek philosopher. The indepen- 

 dence of each city was the one cardinal principle from which 

 all Greek political life started. The State, the commonwealth, 

 was in Greek eyes a city, an organized society of men dwelling 

 in a walled town as the hearth and home of the political 

 society, and with a surrounding territory not too large to allow 

 all its free inhabitants habitually to assemble within its walls 

 to discharge the duties of citizens." 



