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In taking as subject for this lecture the State and the part it has played in history I thought it would respond to a need which is greatly felt at this moment. It is of consequence, after having so often criticized the present State, to seek the cause of its appearance, to investigate the part played by it in the past, and to compare it with the institutions which it superseded.

Let us first agree as to what we mean by the word State. There is, as you know, the German school that likes to confuse the State with Society. This confusion is to be met with even among the best German thinkers and many French ones, who cannot conceive of Society without State concentration. Yet to reason thus is entirely to ignore the progress made in the domain of history during the last thirty years; it is to ignore the fact that men have lived in societies during thousands of years before having known the State; it is to forget that for European nations the State is of recent origin—that it hardly dates from the sixteenth century; it is to fail to recognise that the most glorious epochs in humanity were those in which liberties and local life were not yet destroyed by the State, and when masses of men lived in communes and free federations.