"The doctrine was liberalism, which criticised and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community; and asserted instead the primacy of the individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws. From such a belief it followed that the State, instead of being the embodiment of a national community as it had been under the Tudors and the Commonwealth, was required to dwindle into a kind of policeman, standing apart from the national life, and with the merely negative task of keeping the free-for-all of individual competition within the bounds of decorum."