Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/224

 into society is combined with a tendency to remain individuals, to resist the obligations of civil society, and thus to threaten its dissolution. Society must be made a moral and rational whole.

When an action is in agreement with juridical laws, we say that it has legality: when an action is in agreement with ethical laws, we say that it has morality. The coercion of law has its justification in the reason underlying the law. A perfect civil constitution cannot be established, unless the external relations between States are regulated according to law, with reason supporting the law. An advance has to be made from the lawless condition of savages: the Federation of Peoples has to be prepared for and entered upon. 'Every State, even the smallest, may thus rely for its safety and its rights not on its own power, nor on its own judgement of right, but only on this Foedus Amphictionum—on the combined power of this League of States, and on the decision of the common will according to laws.' This, said Kant, may seem to be very visionary; and the idea has been ridiculed in the way in which it has been put forward by an Abbé de Saint-Pierre or a Rousseau. But it is the inevitable issue of the necessity in which men are tied to each other. Wars should subserve—should, in their results, be made to subserve—this end. Wars (when we think of the purpose of Nature) are attempts to bring about new relations between peoples; through destruction or dismemberment they institute new political corporations. Out of all the actions and reactions of men is nothing rational to result? Is it to be said, and is it to be incontrovertible, that discord is natural to our species, and that, in spite of the presence of many marks of a civilized society, all is but a preparation for a 'hell of evils' at the end? Cultivated we have become, and to a high degree, in the sciences and arts. We are civilized, even to excess, in all that pertains to forms of politeness and social elegance. But much remains to be done before it can