Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/57

Rh and, in proportion to the difficulty of correctly calculating the value of these different, delicate, and shifting elements, it is obvious that the result must be of a very arbitrary and fluctuating kind.

It is evident, then, first, that no State, in any precise political sense, can be said at any given moment to be exactly equal to any other State; and, secondly, that the political relations of States to each other, as measured by the subtle and varying elements above enumerated, are likely to undergo constant and even rapid change. It is in the constant flux and change of these elements, without adequate constitutional provision for recognizing and incorporating them in their constantly modified form, that the main cause of European Wars will be found to exist. It is precisely the same story as that of the growth of a national society into a true and fully developed State. In this region the old forms show extraordinary tenacity of life, and a contest ensues between the exuberant life of the people and the fast and tight leading-strings in which the primitive constitution seeks to confine it. A dilemma is presented in which either the constitution must be modified peaceably, as has generally been the case in England; or violently, as was the case in France in 1789; or the popular life must be suppressed and the nascent State crushed out with it, as in the Asiatic States which have succumbed beneath the weight of military and despotic Governments.

1. Nor is it merely that the elements above enumerated undergo incessant change in all States which have any progressive character at all, but the rate and mode of change is different in different countries. The result is that there arrives a time, by no means the same for all States, at which a sort of antagonism is experienced between what may be called the variable and the fixed elements of national existence. The variable