Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/49

Rh The need and opportunity for subterfuge and chicanery, fencing and finessing, are greater in international policy than in the conduct of domestic. The very function of a nation's laws is to mediate between interests, and even to establish a concord of interests, within one body politic. But in the case of the international system we assume the existence and force of the interests of the units—the several States; and there has not been established an international constitution, with an authority that shall superintend, mediate, and be sovereign. The formula of a 'balance of power' was often and for a long time spaciously applied, and can still be, even while it might be interpreted, in the official language of French diplomacy, according to one's own views and special interests. But it is a formula that testifies, in itself, both to the deep-rooted rivalry of interests among the Powers, and to the absence of a duly-constituted authority for regulating those interests. In the words of Bolingbroke, the scales of the balance could never be exactly poised. The Primacy of the