Page:Justice in war time by Russell, Bertrand.djvu/46

20 soldiers of that country as modern armaments render possible. There is a certain unreality, a certain lack of imaginative grasp about this way of viewing matters. It has the advantage, always dearly prized by lazy men, of substituting a formula, at once ambiguous and easily applied, for the vital realisation of the consequences of acts. The judicial point of view is properly applicable to the relations of individuals within a State, but not, as yet, to the relations between States. Within a State, private war is forbidden, and the disputes of private citizens are settled, not by their own force, but by the force of the police, which, being overwhelming, very seldom needs to be explicityexplicitly [sic] displayed. There have to be rules according to which the police decide who is to be considered in the right in a private dispute, and these rules constitute law. The chief gain derived from the law and the police is the abolition of private wars, and this gain is secured even if the law as it stands is not the best possible. It is therefore in the public interest that the man who goes against the law should be considered in the wrong, not because of the excellence of the law, but because of the importance of preventing individuals within the State from resorting to force.

In the interrelations of States nothing of the same sort exists. There is, it is true, a body of conventions called "international law," and there are innumerable treaties between High Contracting Powers. But the conventions and the treaties differ from anything that could properly be called law by the absence of sanction: there is no police force able or willing to enforce their observance. It follows from this that every nation concludes multitudes of divergent and