which can conquer another, may be already an organized society, having a degree of permanency and order, and that, therefore, the explanation of its organization may lie farther back than its exploitation of its less bellicose victim. The difference in political thought between the thirteenth-century writer and the twentieth, is that the former essayed to explain the origin of civil society; while the latter offers what really amounts to an explanation of the enlargement, localization, or development of states. And even as such, the explanation is too sweeping. States have not infrequently in History been the outcome of pacts, instead of conquests. Our own Thirteen Original Colonies united themselves in a manner which Oppenheimer appears to have forgotten. Besides, the pioneers in our country did not exploit the Indians and thereby found a class state; they exploited their own energies and built up a free one. They were more eager to expell the aborigines than to exploit them. Oppenheimer may mention in support of his theory of the origin of the State the instances of Babylonians, Persians, Mongols, the Doric States, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Saxons, etc. These are examples which may be answered with other examples. Unlike Aquinas, Oppenheimer confuses an effect or an occasion of states with the cause; an expendience with a necessity; a re-formation with a formation. His statement that "the basic justification of the state, its raison d'être, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated,"136 refutes itself as a theory of the origin of civil society. The origin of the state is its foundation and not its justification.

His theory of civil society suits an economic age better than it interprets the facts. Aquinas seeks the source of the State within the human beings who make and constitute it, appreciating that historical explanations are, at most and best, superficial. History cannot sound deep causes. Philosophy is indispensable to an understanding. History gives particular facts; philosophy looks behind them and finds general processes.

Significantly, there is no democratic savor to this typically up-to-date doctrine of civil society, which Oppenheimer presents. In it, we find the faults of preceding views, plus new ones.

136 The State, page 30.

The unflattering implication is that men are but thistle-down on economic winds; their subjective powers are far exceeded by objective and adverse forces; they are not the stuff of which democracy is made. But Aquinas finds reasons to credit man with the possession of potentialities which, evolved, can render him God-like. At the same time, he beholds the race expressing itself in society, rather than society repressing the race. These two views are premises with promises. In the vista of the first, logically Aquinas must detect final democracy, or selfrule, provided that individuals take care to advance toward the Ideal. In the second, he sees the justification of law and order; for it were folly for man to decry a goodly expression of his own rational nature, such as the State is, and to renounce the positive advantages that accrue to him from a civil status. Even as Herbert Spencer, is St. Thomas conscious that, while in the body the parts exist for the sake of the whole, in society the whole exists for the sake of the parts.137

His theory of State is solid because his principles are deep and grounded not in any such variable as economics, but in the very constancy of human nature itself. It should be acceptable to the twentieth century, for it presents the best and most rational basis for democracy.

Having seen St. Thomas' primary political doctrine both in itself and in contrast to the efforts of later and allegedly greater authorities, we may pass to a consideration of his idea of State.

137 Summa Theol., 2a 2ae, qu. LVIII, a. IX, ad 3: "Bonum commune est finis singularum personarum in communitate existentium, sicut bonum totius est bonum cuiuslibet partium."

CHAPTER II

POWER

Saint Thomas teaches that the individual, if able to live by himself, would, under God, be his own king.138 The necessity for rulers would be nil. The hypothetical character of the assertion saves Aquinas from sounding like Rousseau. It is because the human being, with an endowment of reason, approaches the divine, that the Angelic Doctor has some of the enthusiasm with which Democritus of old, regarding man a god, glowed. The Deity governs according to reason, and His rational creatures share in His régime. Reason is the principal of human acts, their rule, and measure. 139 It is therefore fundamental in the State.

We need look for nothing radical in St. Thomas' doctrine. Its constant aspiration to reasonableness precludes any comfort to either the bolshevist or the ultra conservatist. Because he devotes so much consideration to the rational aspects of man, he can never forget the individual's powers, prerogatives, and place in the divine plan. Every reasonable human want is of the utmost importance; for all spring from a nature that is god-like.140

1.-ETHICAL ASPECT OF POWER

In the preceding chapter, an ethical element in his answer to the primary question of politics was observed. Very important in his conception of the foundation of the State, this same moral aspect is even more so in his idea of its structure. We have seen his explanation of the appearance of civil society. Now his thought practically tends more and more to the ideal.

138 De Reg., Lib. I, cap. 1.

139 Summa Theol., la 2ae, qu. XC, a.2.

140 He warns us, though, that in adjudging what is natural to man, we must consider those things which are strictly according to his nature and are not corruptions of it. Com Polit., Lib. I, lec. 2.

Being a psychologist, however, he does not soar off to any such beautiful but unreal realms as Plato's Republic, Campanella's City of the Sun, Moore's Utopia, or Bacon's Atlantis. He stands firmly in reality, though ever pointing to a noble purpose for which the State was conceived and by which it must be guided.

He sees man's human relations revolving on the four cardinal virtues. For him, as J. Martin Littlejohn notes, “Political ethics may be characterized as individual ethics extended to the political domain."141 His whole science is impregnated with the morality of which man's rational nature is the norm, and without which, as up-to-date thinkers are coming to realize, democracy is sheer fancy.142 Littlejohn, however, is wrong in his further opinion that St. Thomas bases his politics entirely on abstract principles of human nature and has no concern with the facts of the external world. The intimacy of Aquinas with the eminently empirical Aristotle, whose researches covered so many constitutions, and his varied contact with the intense times in which he himself lived, must have rendered him keen to the actual. His writings prove that he was.143 He peers so closely into the human heart and mind because he realizes that right here is the source of the actual; he is equally interested in the ethical, because it leads to the ideal. He is, first and last, but never solely, a philosopher.

Among the practical sciences, Aquinas finds ethics the first; and in ethics a most important department is politics, inasmuch as it considers the ultimate and perfect good in things human.144 Morals are great agents in St. Thomas' construction of the State; in this, he differs from the Machiavellian separation of the political virtues from the moral. He rejects the idea of

141 The Political Theory of the Schoolmen and Grotius, p. 58. 142 See Vol. XIV of the Publications of the American Sociological Society, The Problem of Democracy; Art. on A Working Democracy, by Frank W. Blackmar: "But in reality democracy is something more than a form of government. It is the co-operating spirit life of the people working in harmony to establish justice among all for all.” P. 4. 143 We find in the prologue to his Com. on Aristotle's Politics: "necesse est hanc scientiam (i. e., politicam) sub practica philosophia contineri, cum civitas sit quoddam totum, cuius humana ratio non solum est cognoscitiva, set etiam operativa."

144 Prologus ad Com.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that there is only an extrinsic bond uniting the community. He bases the State on natural law and a common social nature, and therefore sanctions it both extrinsically and intrinsically, physically and ethically.

2.-LAW

In any state, the most prominent feature is law. From the very purpose of law is evinced its necessity; and St. Thomas gives the topic abundant attention. "To the medieval mind," Carlyle observes, "the law was the practical form of justice, and it is in the due maintenance of law that men found the security for justice and for all good in life."145 The justice which law expresses and which Aristotle calls "the political good." since it is "in the interest of all" (Politics, III, 12), is democratically defined by Aquinas as a constant and perpetual will to concede every man his rights.146 At the bottom of the law, Aquinas places love. He sees all men striving toward the same goal, and hence a union existing among them. Mutual sacrifice, aid, and forbearance are imperative. And law is regulative of these important relations which love either inspires or confirms.147 It is the result and cause of organization and, as Dante calls it, "the bond of society." The democracy of the Angelic Doctor's teaching on the common destiny of men is equal only to the beauty of it. Aristotle is more impressive than adequate when he declares that "law is an agreement, and as the sophist Lycophron says, a pledge between the citizens of their intending to do justice to each other" (Politics, III, 9). Aquinas comprehends and expresses in his writings the highest reason and motive for such an agreement.

In no part of his politics is he in finer accord with the fairest democratic sentiment than in his treatise on Laws. His text is warm with a popular message. The people are both protected and enriched by the principles which he proposes.

145 His. of Med. Polit. Theory, Vol. III, p. 37. Cf. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib. IV, c. 4: "Remota itaque justitia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?"

146 Summa Theol., 2a 2ae, qu. LVIII, a. 1. 147 Summa Theol., 2a or 2ae, qu. XCIV, a. 2.