ss enviable
situations than that of the minister of a very small State at the court
of a very large one. But the mere fact that force is their sanction does
not _ipso facto_ dispose of diplomatic and arbitrational methods. We all
know that the force at the disposal of the Sovereign is the ultimate
sanction of Law. But that force never has to be fully exerted because
there is a common consent to respect the Law and its officers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Cf. Webb, _Industrial Democracy_, p. 718.]

Sec. 12

Manners no Substitute for Morals

The real difference between legal methods and the methods of diplomacy
(in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is
that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no
Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both
parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in
two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible between
them. For all their ambassadors and diplomatic conferences the nations
of Europe are only wolves with good manners. And manners, as we all
know, are no substitute for morals.

Sec. 13

War a Moral Anachronism

Thus we come back to our thesis that war is not only possible but
inevitable so long as the extent of the moral sphere is conterminous
with the frontiers of the State. But merely to explain laboriously that
all this organised killing is not really a paradox but the natural
accompaniment of a certain stage of moral development, and to leave it
at that, would be rather to exaggerate our philosophic detachment. The
point is that we are long past the stage of regarding any but our
fellow-subjects as moral outlaws. For some years, to say the least, it
has been generally received that the sphere of morality is co-extensive
with mankind. In spite of certain lingering exceptions, it is to-day a
commonplace of thought that every human being on the earth is our
colleague in civilisation; is a member that is of the human race, which
finding itself on this earth has got somehow to make the best of it; is
a shareholder in the human asset of self-consciousness which we are
called upon to exploit. It would certainly be hard to find a man of what
we have called enlightened opinions who would not profess, whatever his
private feelings, that it is as great a crime to kill a Hottentot or a
Jew as to kill an Englishman. With certain lingering exceptions then we
already regar