perversion comes, not through
any flaw or vice in human nature, but by the force of the idea, because
the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its
power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are
absolute, which is false, instead of asserting that they are absolute
in their own sphere, but that their sphere itself is contingent upon
the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals,
which is true. Thus it constrains them to a career of indefinite
expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality
and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain
infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite. In the
meantime their rivals, and their subjects, and they themselves are
conscious of the danger of opposing forces, and seek to {50} purchase
security and to avoid a collision by organizing a balance of power.
But the balance, whether in international politics or in industry, is
unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a
principle by which the claims of nations and individuals are limited,
but on an attempt to find an equipoise which may avoid a conflict
without adjuring the assertion of unlimited claims. No such equipoise
can be found, because, in a world where the possibilities of increasing
military or industrial power are illimitable, no such equipoise can
exist.

Thus, as long as men move on this plane, there is no solution. They
can obtain peace only by surrendering the claim to the unfettered
exercise of their rights, which is the cause of war. What we have been
witnessing, in short, during the past five years, both in international
affairs and in industry, is the breakdown of the organization of
society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations. Sooner or
later the collapse was inevitable, because the basis was too narrow.
For a right is simply a power which is secured by legal sanctions, "a
capacity," as the lawyers define it, "residing in one man, of
controlling, with the assistance of the State, the action of others,"
and a right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power
should not be absolute. No doubt it is better that individuals should
have absolute rights than that the State or the Government should have
them; and it was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by
the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the
absol