exist. Its work is
concerned with the maintenance of prestige.

These ideal values and the integrity of the appearance of supremacy,
are sustained by the assumption of the forms of empire or the
imperialistic attitude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the
forms which nations assume, and this dramatization of imperial form is
the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the
integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the
supremacy a nation assumes, becomes more important than even the
securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very
reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the
assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal.
To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal,
and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore,
there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must
present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is
their flag, the symbol of their place in the world and of their
military prowess and courage; their ambassadors, the representatives
of their dignity and the symbol of their pretended friendliness; their
display of royal forms, which is the sign of their prestige and their
imperial nature, about which they are most sensitive. Offenses to
these symbols of what a nation assumes itself to be and demands that
others should think it, tend to be _mortal_ offenses, because they
invade the sphere of what nations hold to be their reality. So the
relations of nations to one another must, as we say, always be formal.
Nations can allow no intimacy. Why they cannot one can readily see,
for it is not difficult to detect the fear, the jealousy, and the
inferiority motive behind all this assumption and display. Treitschke
shows us what national honor may mean when it is carried out into a
philosophy of state. Here is the idea of national self-consciousness
at its greatest height. The state must not tolerate equals, or at
least it must reduce the number of equals as much as possible. The
state must be absolutely independent. The state, furthermore, cannot
have too keen a sense of its dignity and position. A state must
declare war if its flag is insulted, however slight the circumstances
may be.

National honor, its codes and standards and its justification and
vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of
dueling and th