en the founders of the American Republic severed the tie which bound
them to Great Britain, they stated that "_a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires_ that they should declare the causes
which impel them to the separation."

The Declaration assumed that there was a rule of right and wrong that
regulated the intercourse of nations as well as individuals; it
believed that there was a great human conscience, which rises higher
than the selfish interests and prejudices of nations and races, and
which approves justice and condemns injustice. It felt that this
approval is more to be desired than national advantage. It constituted
mankind a judge between contending nations and lest its judgment
should temporarily err it established posterity as a court of last
resort. It placed the tie of humanity above that of nationality. It
proclaimed the solidarity of mankind.

In the years that have intervened since this noble Declaration, the
world has so far progressed towards an enlightened sense of justice
that a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" has proved an
efficient power in regulating peacefully and justly the intercourse
of nations. Each nation does at least in some measure fear to-day the
disapproval of civilization. The time gives this proof in the eager
desire of Germany to-day--despite its policy of "blood and iron"--to
gain the sympathetic approval of the American people, not with the
remotest hope of any practical cooperation but to avoid that state of
moral isolation, in which the land of Luther now finds itself.

_The Supreme Court of Civilization does exist._ It consists of
cosmopolitan men in every country, who put aside racial and national
prejudices and determine the right and wrong of every issue between
nations by that slowly forming system of international morality which
is the conscience of mankind.

To a certain class of German statesmen and philosophers this Court of
Public Opinion is a visionary abstraction. A group of distinguished
German soldiers, professors, statesmen, and even doctors of divinity,
pretending to speak in behalf of the German nation, have consciously
or unconsciously attempted to revive in the twentieth century the
cynical political morality of the sixteenth.

As Symonds, the historian of the Renaissance, says in his _Age of the
Despots_, Machiavelli was the first in modern times to formulate a
theory of government in which the interests of the ruler are alone
r