Chapter III: Liberty and Social Power (2)

Yet that is the underlying assumption of much of our social life. We emphasize opinion which satisfies those in power, we discount opinion which runs counter to it; above all we take it for granted that silence and consent are one and the same thing. Every one of these attitudes is a blunder; especially is it a blunder, for which we pay heavily, in matters of social importance. It is extraordinarily dangerous, for example, to assume that English public opinion disapproved the General Strike because Mayfair was indignant, the _Morning Post_ hysterical, and Sir John Simon coldly hostile; for Mayfair and the _Morning Post_, even with Sir John Simon, do not constitute English public opinion. Our difficulty is that they will be taken to constitute it when it is to the interest of government to do so. Such an equation is serious, and may well be fatal, to any who think of social peace as a thing really worth while to preserve.

We must remember, too, what goes along with a process of this kind. Those who lament the ignorance of public opinion too often forget that in an unequal society it is necessary to repress the expression of individuality. Every attempt at such expression is an attempt at the equalization of social conditions; it is an attempt to make myself count, an insistence on my claim, an assertion of my right to be treated as equal in that claim with other persons. To admit that I ought to have that freedom is to deny that the inequality upon which society rests is valid. And, accordingly, every sort of devious method, conscious and unconscious, is adopted to prevent my assertiveness. The most subtle, perhaps, is the denial of adequate educational facilities; for what, in fact, that does is to prevent me from knowing how to formulate my claim effectively, and unattention is the price I have to pay for my ineffectiveness. My claim, then, however real or just, because it is clumsily presented fails to secure the consideration it deserves. Or, again, the view of a group may be simply discounted where it fails to please the holders of power. We are impressed, for instance, when we hear that a government, say that of Mr Lloyd George, is solid in its determination not to give way to the miners; we assume a careful weighing of the facts and a decision taken in the light of their total significance. But when we hear that the miners are solidly behind their leaders, we feel that this is a clear case of ignorant and misguided men being led to their destruction by agitators enjoying the exercise of power. The whole machinery of news-making is directed to the confirmation of that impression; and the chance that the miners’ claim will be considered equally is destroyed by the weight which unequal economic power attaches to the case against that claim. The opinion represented by the miners is not objectively valued. It is the victim of a process of valuation the purpose of which is to prevent, so far as possible, an alteration of the _status quo_; and, _mutatis mutandis_, this is true of all claims which seek alteration in a significant degree.

Now it is, I think, unquestionable that in an unequal society, the effort of ordinary men to attain the condition we call happiness is hampered at every turn. The power of numbers is sacrificed to the interest of a few. The truth of the facts which might make a just solution is distorted for a similar end. Freedom, therefore, in an unequal society has no easy task as it seeks realization. For its search is not to realize itself for its own sake, but for what, as it is realized, it is able to bring. We seek religious freedom for the truth our religion embodies. We seek political freedom for the ends that, in the political world, we deem good. We seek economic freedom for the satisfaction brought by making an end of the frustration to our personality an irrational subordination implies. Men do not, I believe, resent an environment when they feel that they share adequately in its making and in the end for which it is made. But they are bound to be at least apathetic, and possibly hostile, when the sense is wide and deep that they are no more than its instruments. That is the secret of the profound allegiance trade unionism is able to create. Its members see in its activities the expression of the power for which they are individually searching. Few states--it is surely a significant thing--have ever won from their subjects a loyalty so profound as the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, or the trade unions in the cotton trades. Even the blunders of their leaders meet with a pardon far more generous than would be extended to the political heads of the state. The reason lies in the degree to which the trade union expresses the intimate experience of its members. And until the policy of the state meets that experience with similar profundity conflict between the government and the trade union will rarely involve the desertion by the members of the association they have themselves made. What the government will represent as disloyalty to the state will seem to trade unionists a service which is freedom.

The point I am seeking to make was summarized with the insight of genius by Disraeli when he spoke of the rich and poor as in fact two nations. For the poor, their voluntary organizations evoke the same kind of impassioned loyalty as a nation struggling to be free is able to win from its members. Anyone who reads, for example, the early history of bodies like the miners’ unions, and seeks to measure the meaning of the sacrifices men were willing to make on their behalf, will realize that he is meeting precisely the same kind of temper as he can parallel from the history of the Italian struggle against Austria or of the Balkan fight against Turkish domination. What Keir Hardie did for the miners of Ayrshire, what Sidney Hillman has done for the garment workers of America, are as epic and as creative, in their way, as the work of Garibaldi and Mazzini. The latter must have seemed at Vienna just as wrong and as unwise as Keir Hardie seemed to the mineowners fifty years ago, or Hillman to the garment manufacturer accustomed, in the classic phrase, to “conduct his own business in his own way.” The point in each case is the important one that power is challenged in the interest of self-government; that the focal point of conflict is an inability on the part of those who govern to interpret the experience of their subjects as these read its meaning; with the result, again in each case, that the imposition of an interpretation from without leaves those upon whom it is imposed with the sense that their lives and their happiness are instruments and not ends.

What is the outcome of it all? For me, at least, essentially that a society pervaded by the fact of unequality is bound to deny freedom and, therefore, to provoke conflict. Its values will be so distorted, its apparatus for magnifying that distortion so complete, that it is blinded to the realities which confront it. We do not need to go far for proof. The daily newspaper, the novel, the poet, all confirm it. Compare Macaulay’s glorification of Victorian progress with the picture in Carlyle’s _Chartism_, or Dickens’ _Hard Times_. Set the resounding complacency of Mr. Gladstone’s perorations against the indignant insight of William Morris and Ruskin. Think of the America of President Coleridge’s speeches, and the America as bitterly described by Mr Sinclair Lewis. Remember that Treitzschke’s eulogy of blood and iron is a picture of the same Germany as that which Bebel and Liebkneckt sought to overthrow. Guizot’s era of the _juste milieu_ is the period of Proudhon and Leroux, of Considerant and Louis Blanc, all of them, however mistakenly, the protagonists of a just society. Men think differently who live differently. If we have a society of unequals, how can we agree either about means or ends? And if this agreement is absent how can we, at least over a considerable period, hope to move on our way in peace?

An unequal society always lives in fear, and with a sense of impending disaster in its heart. The effect of this atmosphere is clear enough. We have only to examine the history of France after the death of Louis XIV to realize exactly what it implies. Everyone who seeks to penetrate below the surface sees some vast calamity ahead. It may be a visitor like Chesterfield, a timid lawyer like Barbier, an ex-minister like D’Argenson, a philosopher like Voltaire. The government itself, and those with whom it is allied, has a perception that something new is abroad. They fear the novelty and they seek to suppress it, in the belief that a bold front and an adequate severity will stem the tide of critical scepticism. But neither boldness nor severity can stem that tide. The government falters for a moment on the verge of concession: there is an hour when the ministry of Turgot seemed likely to inaugurate an era of conciliation. It is too late because the price of conciliation is the sacrifice of precisely the vested interests with which the government is in partnership. So the ancient régime moves relentlessly to its destruction. It is forced to consult those whose experience it had never taken into account in the hope of salvation; and they find that, if they are to fulfil, they must also destroy.

That is, other things being equal, the inevitable history of such societies. Their mental habits resemble nothing so much as the horrified timidity which persuaded Hobbes to find in despotism the only cure for social disagreement. They are afraid of reason, for this involves an examination into their own prerogative and, as at least probable, a denunciation of the title by which it is preserved. They are afraid of concession, because they see in it an admission of the weakness of their case. They magnify scepticism into sedition and they accuse even their friends who doubt the virtue of severity of betraying the allegiance which is their due. They cannot see that men will not accept the state as the appointed conscience of the nation unless they conceive themselves to possess a full share of its benefits. They minimize the sufferings of others, because they do not have experience of them, and they magnify their own virtues that they may gain confidence in themselves. They distort history, and call it patriotism; they repress the expression of grievance and call it the maintenance of law and order. In such a society, the governors appear to their subjects as dwellers in another world; and communication between them lacks the vivifying quality of fellowship. For the truth of one party is never sufficiently the truth of another for the members to talk a common language. Every vehemence becomes a threat; and by a kind of mad logic every threat is taken as an act of treason. The society is unbalanced because justice is not its habitation. Even its generosity will be resented because it has not known how to be just.

I do not want to be taken as implying that violence is the inevitable end. I only argue that the irrefutable and inherent logic of a society where the gain of living is not proportioned to its toil is one of which violence is the inevitable end. We have never any choice in history except to follow reason wholly or, ultimately, to expect disaster; and as we approach that ultimate, the temper of the society will be what I have described. For the rule of reason in a community means that a special interest must always give way before the principles it discovers. And the rule of reason is the only kind of rule which can afford the luxury of freedom. That is, I think, because an admission that the claims of reason are paramount makes possible the emergence of a spirit of compromise. The basis of the society being just, men are not prepared for conflict over detail; but when the basis itself is unacceptable, conflict over detail is magnified into a fight over principle. In such a temper, men are always discussing with their backs on the edge of a precipice. Social discussion becomes Carlyle’s ultimate question of “Can I kill thee or canst thou kill me?” Every utterance is necessarily a challenge; and suppressed because so taken; every association is a conspiracy and attacked because so imagined. The only way to avoid so poisonous an atmosphere is to be prepared to surrender what you cannot prove it is reasonable to hold. But, human nature being what it is, men do not easily surrender what they have the power to retain; and they will pay the price of conflict if they think they can win. They do not remember that the price of conflict is the destruction of freedom and that with its loss there go the qualities which make for the humanity of men.

IV

I spoke a little earlier of the sense of national freedom; and these lectures would be even more incomplete than they are unless I sought to dwell briefly on what such freedom means. Let me take here as my text a sentence from John Stuart Mill which might well stand as the classic embodiment of one of the outstanding ideals of the nineteenth century. “It is” he wrote “in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” I do not need to remind you of the commentary history has written upon that text. In its name were accomplished the unity of Italy and Germany, the breakup of the Turkish and Russian empires, the separation of the Baltic peoples from the domination of Russia. The economic motive apart, no principle has been more fruitful of war than the demand for national freedom. Even yet, the day of its power is far from ended; for every misapplication of Mill’s principle in the peace treaties of 1919 has raised problems of government which the world will find it difficult to solve without the bloody arbitrament of the sword.

Now nationality is a subjective conception that eludes definition in scientific terms. As an Englishman, I can feel in my bones the sense of what English nationality implies; I feel intimately, for instance, the things that enable me to claim Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens as typically English, without being able to put into words the things that make them so. Every factor to which nationality has been traced, race, language, common political allegiance, is an excessive simplicity which betrays scientific exactitude. It is true that nationality is born of a common historic tradition, of achievement and suffering mutually shared; it is true, also, that language and race, and even a common political allegiance, have played their part in its formation. It is obvious that there is something exclusive about nationality, that the members of any given nation have a sense of separateness from other people which gives them a feeling of difference, of uniqueness, which makes domination by others so unpleasant as to involve profound discomfort to a point which may involve, even justly involve, resistance to that domination. But the fact remains that nationality is a psychological phenomenon rather than a juridical principle. It is in the former, not the latter, sphere that we must seek to meet its claims.

Mill’s principle, if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that every nation has a title to statehood. I want you to think what that implies. The modern state is a sovereign state, and in terms of that title no will can bind its purpose but its own. The legal meaning of sovereignty is omnicompetence. The state may, as it please, make peace or war. It can erect its own tariffs, restrict its immigration, decide upon the rights of aliens within its borders, without the duty of consulting its neighbours, or paying any attention to principles of justice. States have done all these things. There is no crime they have not been prepared to commit for the defence or the extension of their own power. A different moral code has been applied in history to their acts from what we insist upon applying to individual acts, and it is, quite definitely, a lower moral code. The history of the nation which becomes a state and insists upon the prerogatives of its statehood is a history incompatible with the terms upon which the maintenance of peace depends. That exclusive temper which, as I have argued, is the root of nationality means a measurable loss of ethical quality in those international relations which are concerned with questions of power. You have only to remember the acts which, during the war, states attempted against one another amid the applause of their subjects to realize that the recognition of national unity as a state means the destruction of private liberty and the violation of international justice, unless we can find means of setting some limit to the powers of which a nation-state can dispose.

I am particularly concerned with the exercise of those powers on their economic side. The nation-state is expected to protect the activities of its citizens outside its own boundaries. Its prestige becomes associated with its power to act in this way. So Germany supports the Mannesman brothers in Morocco, England the Rothschilds in Egypt, America its citizens in half the territories of South America. Nationalism becomes imperialism and this means the enslavement of lesser nations to the imperialistic power. In its worst temper, its eternal character was described by Thucydides in that passage where he relates the tragic end of Melos, a passage it would be mere insolence either to summarize or to praise. Even where imperialism has resulted in measurable benefit to the subject people, as with Great Britain in India, or the United States in the Philippines, the resultant loss of responsibility and character, which an imposed rule implies, is a heavy price to pay for the efficiency of administration that has been conferred. The noble phrase of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman that good government is no substitute for self-government seems to me borne out by every phase of the history of imperialism. It is the imposition of a system of experience upon a people ignorant of the character of that experience for ends only partially its own, and by methods which neglect unduly the relation of consent to happiness in the process of government. The classic case in my own experience is that of Ireland. I cannot find ground upon which to defend the habits of Great Britain there. But those habits seem to me the inevitable outcome of an assumption that Great Britain was entitled to decide alone the character of her own destiny.

Nationality, in a word, must, if it is to be consistent with the needs of civilization, be set in the context that matters of common interest to more than one nation-state cannot be decided by the fiat of one member of the international community. Modern science and modern economic organization has reduced this world to the unity of interdependence: the inference from this condition is, as I think, the supremacy of cosmopolitan need over the national claim. A nation, that is, is not entitled to be the sole judge of its conduct where that conduct, by its subject-matter, implicates others. It must consult with them, compromise with them, find the means of resolving the problem in terms of peace. Everyone of us can think of functions that, in the modern world, entail international consequences by their inherent character. We have passed the stage where we can allow a state to fix its own boundaries as it thinks best, without consultation with other states. The same is true of matters like the treatment of racial minorities, of the scale of armaments, of the making of war and peace. Everyone can see that matters like the control of the traffic in noxious drugs, or of women and children, of epidemics like cholera and typhus, cannot be settled save as states co-operate upon agreed methods of action. Most people can see, at least in principle, that the same thing applies to labour conditions, to legal questions like the law of bills and notes, or the rights of aliens before a municipal court, or the incorporation of public companies. An historian who surveyed the history of international investment would, I think, not illegitimately conclude that there are principles applicable to its control which can justly regard with indifference the question of the nationality of the investor or the state-power to which, save in cases of default, he is certain to appeal. The importance of the supply of raw materials to international economic life forces us to consider the deliberate rationing of that supply, and the maintenance of a stable world price level which thinks first of cosmopolitan need, and, only after a long interval, of national profit. A sane man would, I suggest, conclude that if bodies like the International Rail Syndicate, or the Continental Commercial Union in the glass industry, find it sensible to transcend national competition by international agreement, _a fortiori_ the principle applies to matters of world-concern.

I am, of course, only illustrating the problem.[51] The principle which seems to me to emerge is the necessity for world-control where the decision is of world-concern. The inference from that principle is that the rights of the state are always subject to, and limited by, the necessarily superior rights of the international community. State-sovereignty, that is, in the sense in which the nineteenth century used that term, is obsolete and dangerous in a world like our world. It gives an authority to the nation-state which, in the light of the facts, is incompatible with the well-being of the world. It invokes the factor of prestige in realms where it has no legitimate application. It means that problems of which a wise solution is possible only in terms of reason have to find a solution amid circumstances of passion and power which obviate any possibility of justice.

For in the external, as in the internal, sphere of the state, the choice is between the use of reason and conflict. The use of reason is the law of liberty; conflict means the erosion of liberty. If states are to conduct their operations always with the knowledge in the background that the price of disagreement is war, the consequences are obvious. The atmosphere of international affairs will be poisoned by fear, and fear will bring with it the system of armaments and alliances which, in 1914, issued naturally and logically in the Great War. That was the price properly paid for a scheme of things which assumed that the legal right of the state was unlimited, and harnessed to the support of that legality every primitive and barbarous passion by which nationalism can degrade humanity. We need not be afraid to assert that, in the international sphere, the sovereignty of the state simply means the right of any powerful nation to make its own conception of self-interest applicable to its weaker opponents. It is the old doctrine of self-help clothed in legal form; the doctrine against which law itself came as a protest in the name of order and common sense. And exactly as we cannot admit the right of a man to make his own law in the internal life of the community, so we cannot allow the single nation-state to make its own law in the wider life of the international community. Because that is what the sovereignty of the state ultimately means, the sovereignty of the state is a conception which outrages the patent needs of international well-being.

I conclude, therefore, that if the nation is entitled to self-government, it is to a self-government limited and defined by the demands of a wider interest. I conclude that its recognition as a state, if sovereignty be involved in that recognition, is incompatible with a just system of international relations. It is, further, incompatible with the notion of an international law regarded as binding upon the member-states of the international community. I need not dwell upon the impossible difficulties in which the defenders of this doctrine have found themselves.[52] In their extreme form they have even led a great jurist to write of war as the supreme expression of the national will.[53] I am unable to share such a view. Where war begins, freedom ends. Where war begins, the opportunity of making just solutions of any problem in dispute is indefinitely postponed. And I ask you to remember that, although, under modern conditions, a whole nation is implicated in war after its beginning, that is not the case either with its preparation or its declaration. That is an affair of the agents of the state whose interest in the action they take may be totally at variance with the interest of the people for whom they are taken as acting. They may be serving private ambition, a particular party; they may be acting on false information or wrong conceptions. My point is that they dispose of the whole power of the state, and that there is no means of checking their activity save the very unlikely means of revolution. The full implications of national sovereignty are a license to wreck civilization. I cannot recognize those implications as necessary to a proper view of national freedom.

I deny, therefore, that there is any qualitative difference between the interests or the rights of states, and the interests or rights of other associations or individuals. Their purposes are ordinary, human purposes like any other: they are a means to the happiness of their members. They have, it seems to me, to be judged by exactly the same principles as those by which we judge the conduct of a trade union, or a church, or a scientific society. They do not constitute a corporate person living on a plane different from, and having standards other than, those of the individuals of whom they are composed. I fully agree that no decision ought to be taken about them, in the making of which they do not amply share. I fully agree, also, that limitations imposed upon their activities must pay scrupulous regard to the psychological facts out of which they are built. I do not, for instance, deny that the Partition of Poland was a crime against Poland, or that its inevitable result was to persuade millions of human beings that a war for their resuscitation was a morally justified adventure. But I see no difference between the Partition of Poland and, let us say, the suppression in the community of a Communist Party. Each seems to me an attack upon a corporate experience which is wrong because it does not persuade those who share that experience to abandon its implications. I do not advocate the supremacy of international authority over the national state in order to destroy the national state. I advocate that supremacy as the sole way with which I am acquainted to set the great fact of nationalism in its proper perspective.

My point is, then, that the fact of a nation’s existence does not entitle it to the full panoply of a sovereign state. Scotland and Wales are both of them nations; neither possesses that panoply; neither, I think, suffers in moral or psychological stature by reason of its absence. Neither, let me add, do the Scandinavian peoples--perhaps the happiest of modern communities--who are only sovereign states upon the essential condition that they do not exercise their sovereignty. But there is no more humiliation in that position than in the position any government occupies in the context of its own subjects. Power is, by its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood. Those who exert it can only have their way by making its objects commend themselves, as, also, its methods of pursuing those objects, to those over whom it is exerted. The sovereign king in Parliament could legally disfranchise the working-classes in England; practically we know that it dare not do so. Everyone in England is aware of the grim, practical limitations under which parliamentary sovereignty operates; no one, I believe, finds humiliation in limits such as we know.

What is happening to the world is something of the same sort. The Covenant of the League of Nations is a method of limiting the unfettered exercise of national sovereign power. It is a painful and delicate operation; how painful and how delicate the timidity that has been characteristic of the League’s history makes hideously manifest. At any point in which the history of the League is examined, elections to the Council, operations of the Mandate system, application of a plebiscite, resolution of an international dispute, the statesmen of Geneva have hesitated to act upon the logic of the world’s facts. They have seen great nations confronting them, and they have feared that those nations might, if angered, flout the League and go their own way. So the League has fumbled and compromised and evaded. The big states have controlled it, and over almost all of its history there has fallen, darkening it, the shadow of the war.

Yet experience of the League gives us hope rather than despair. It took three centuries to build up the sovereign national state to that amplitude which proclaimed its own disastrous character in 1914; it would be remarkable indeed if a decade full of memories and hates so passionate as those of the last ten years sufficed to overthrow its authority. We can at least say out of the experience of those ten years that remarkable incursions into that authority have occurred. We have discovered a great range of social questions the solution of which is not relevant to the national state or to the problems of power that state first of all considers. We have been able, that is, to devise subjects of government in which national control is not the obvious technique of operation. We have found, further, that a platform can be constructed at Geneva the nature of which throws any possible aggressor upon the defensive, and suggests the possible organization against it of the rest of the civilized world. We are finding ways of reaching the opinion of citizens in different states over the heads of their governments; of making those citizens demand attention to League recommendations in a way that a generation ago would have been unthinkable. We have shown, and this, in some ways, is the vital discovery of our time, that men of different nationalities can co-operate together in the task of international government in such a way as to sink the pettiness of a narrow outlook before the greatness of the common task. I know that Sir Arthur Salter is a great Englishman; but I believe his quality as an Englishman has been made complete because he is above all a great citizen of the world.

I do not want to exaggerate the prospects of achievement that lie before us; one blunder in Moscow or Rome might easily destroy every hope we may tentatively cherish. I want merely to note that the idea of a world-state is slowly, painfully, hesitantly, taking shape before our eyes. I want to emphasize the logic of that state in an international community so inescapably interdependent as this. I want to draw therefrom the inference that national sovereignty and the international community confront one another as incompatibles. Even the states which have most carefully stood aloof from Geneva are in a degree to which they are themselves unconscious within the orbit of that influence which its idea makes so compelling. There is hardly one aspect of the League’s work in which American citizens have not borne their share; and I should hazard the suspicion that there have been occasions when “unofficial observers” have done considerably more than observe unofficially. I do not believe it is exaggeration to suggest that the underlying motive of the Kellogg Pact was compensation by America for her abstention from the Geneva Covenant. The Pact, by itself, is an empty declaration; but its logic, like that of the Covenant, is likely to take it much further in the direction of international government than its authors intended it should go. Even Russia, in some sort the antipodes of Geneva, has appeared there at Disarmament Conferences; and even granted the rigour of the premises upon which her life is built, she cannot remain unrelated to the structure of a world-order.

I believe, accordingly, that we can retain all that is essential to the freedom of national life, and yet fully admit the implications of the international community. We can leave to England, for instance, her full cultural independence, her characteristic internal institutions, her special contacts with the Dominions she has begotten; to sacrifice the predominance of her navy, her right, by its means, to dictate the law of the sea, would still leave her England. She would still be England even if, to push speculation to the furthest point, the Suez Canal were internationalized and Gibraltar returned to Spain. France would be not the less France if the gold policy of her bank were set by an international authority, if she gave up her zeal for a conscript army, if she built her frontiers upon the impalpable solidity of friendship rather than the shifting waters of the Rhine. I can see nothing in the conceivable policy of a stronger League which would take from her the glory that has made her the Athens of the modern world. Changes in law policy, a different colonial outlook, a willingness to improve the physical standards of labour, an acceptance of novel and military forces determined upon the basis of world safety instead of national aggressiveness--it is difficult to see in any of these things such a blow at freedom as destroys the prospect of national happiness. I can see grounds for the view that an international authority which forbade the teaching of French in French schools; or altered the boundary of France so as to make Marseilles Italian; or sought the abrogation of the French civil code with its profound impact on the social customs of France; might reasonably be regarded as invading what in a nation’s life that nation only can claim to decide. I can see that a nation might feel an international authority to be oppressive if it sought, say, by an immigration policy seriously to alter the _mores_ of a national life; it should not impose Japanese immigration on California any more than Great Britain seeks to impose it upon Australia. I can even see that oppression might be felt where, in the building of an international civil service, there was a sense that there is discrimination against the members of any particular nation, or that in composing the committees of its government proper attention is not given to the claims of some particular power.

The likelihood of any of these difficulties becoming real is, surely, exceedingly small. An international authority must presumably be endowed with an average volume of human common sense; and it is no more likely than any other authority to invite disaster. Indeed it is rather likely to fail to embark upon experiments and decisions it ought to make from an excessively delicate sense of what some particular nation may feel. International life in this realm is much more likely to be a régime of example and influence than one of legislative compulsion simply because the penalties of national dissent would strain too gravely the structure of the authority which sought an unwise imposition of its will. Here, once more, the situation is very like that of the internal life of a national state. There is hardly any association the state could not overthrow if it bent its energies to the task. But, also, most states are wise enough to realize that victories of this kind are empty victories, that solutions imposed by force have consequences invariably too grave to be satisfactory in their application. Consent has its full place in the international sphere; and it is a safeguard of national right as creative here, as elsewhere. Indeed it may reasonably be argued that with the disappearance of national sovereignty, the factor of consent is likely to be far more effective, far more genuinely related to the realities of the world; than it is at the present time. For consent between two powers like, say, America and Nicaragua, or Great Britain and Iraq has something in it which partakes of the ironical spirit. It is consent always in the knowledge that refusal to agree will make no serious difference to the result that occurs. But the surrender of national sovereignty is the surrender of aggressive power; and the nation can move on its way the more freely since it knows that it no longer lives in the shadow of international injustice.