25 
short-hand politics which resolved simply that “ government 
is police.” But it seems to bring out the fact, Bufc what ^ 
that whatever more than police, government may i8 m c ° o r ® tr j b 
be, it is so because the responsible agents of the buted by “the 
community require it to be so. Each individual has lndlvldual - 
to watch this action of the State, and constantly aim that it 
may correspond at last with his own internal conviction of the 
“ right,” the “just,” the “ always-true.” To say that “the 
State has a conscience,” as some have expressed it, is to put 
in an abstract way the truth that it is bound to conform, in 
its corporate acts, to the highest ideal of the responsible 
agents who form the community. (The case of the Family 
is somewhat different, being a j uovapyja. See Aristot. Econ. 
i. i.) 
But when beyond this we advance to ask — wliat those ques- 
tions are which the responsible agents of a community are to 
defer to their rulers in the State ? the subject be- 
comes so involved, that there seems little hope sa^ngTstatl 
of more than tentative solutions, which, after all, has a con - 
will leave in thousands of individuals a sense of un- 
redressed wrong, at variance with any high conception of a per- 
fect Government of Moral Agents according to the excellence 
of their nature - . And this must be inadmissible ; for nature, 
as such, must be regarded as “ good ” ; it aims at its proper 
good, and ought not to be ultimately thwarted in that aim, since 
that would be evil. 
45. Some philosophers, no doubt, like Hobbes of Malmesbury, 
will still regard the laws of the State as furnishing the only 
criterion, if not the only foundation, of all duty. It would be 
difficult to persuade any but philosophers of this. Mankind 
at large always have believed, for example, that 
duties arise out of the natural relations of human of ^ob™es£m^ 
life, quite independently of the support and sane- and u^t it in- 
tion of state-law. Beyond which, the law of the tradition. 
State is “ for the lawless and disobedient.” It can 
have little to do with regulating virtue, except negatively, and 
therefore could not be its standard. A theory which regards 
law as the ground or standard of right is equivalent to a theory 
that all law is good. A bad law is a contradictory phrase in 
that case. But this is evidently absurd. Every attempt to 
improve the laws of any community is a recognition of a 
standard known to the individual mind external to the state- 
action as such. Indeed, it is quite conceivable, morally, that 
correct conduct, which should be “ conformity to law,” and 
nothing more, would not be virtue at all. 
46. When it is urged against Hobbesism, or as it is called 
