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The Green Bag

signify only a temporary rupture, and in any event the old relations will be bound to be restored after only a brief intermission. A relation between fair-dealing and the sense of having something in com mon is assumed in Lord Haldane's idea of an international justice promoted by the sympathetic cohesion of separate powers, and it may be that there is danger of over-emphasizing the neces sity for international solidarity as a prerequisite to peaceable adjustment of all controversies between peoples. It is quite possible, for example, that treaties of general arbitration may be signed and lived up to between nations which have few interests in common and have little sympathy or attachment for each other, and if so the success of the move ment for international arbitration does not depend on the United States or any other power entering into closer fellow ship with other nations. This question was not analyzed in Lord Haldane's address, but there is no occasion for interpreting his remarks in a more sweeping sense than seems to have been intended. Without declaring friendly association between nations to be a prerequisite to fair-dealing, the speaker did lay stress on the virtue of the gettogether spirit, as a means of strengthen ing the instinct for international fairdealing, and there can be no question of the value of such an incentive of comradeship, even if what Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler calls the "international mind" may be evolved by the pressure of other incentives. That the world will progress more rapidly toward the ideal of justice and respect for right under a system of co-operation is mani fest, and this may be admitted without the necessity of any determination how close the co-operation must be or whether it may assume more than one form.

The world-goal which Lord Haldane's discussion of Sittlichkeit seems to envis age is not that of a political federation as necessary to a law-abiding society of nations, but rather of a morally united community held together by a single code of customary international conduct, or world Sittlichkeit, rather than by any actual world polity, which would in fact be no more than a by product of the system and could be dis pensed with. It is self-evident that the leaders in securing recognition of such a code must be the peoples which have the highest standards of morality in their private transactions; in other words the nations highest in civilization are to be the future leaders of the movement for international justice. Although these nations constitute a large and important group, their efforts can be made more effective by break ing the main group into smaller groups, organized on the basis of kindred insti tutions. The notion of a limited AngloSaxon group, working in this manner, is an idea of less potency than that of a great Teutonic cultural group com prehending Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and all the lesser Teutonic nations, but if less majestic and staggering it offers something more concrete and definite, something easier of practical application and tangible fulfillment, to the people of the United States. The strength of Lord Haldane's conception is to be found chiefly in the fact that it puts international right before international law, instead of putting laws and treaties first, that it recognizes the importance of a consensus as to what constitutes international right, and that it looks to the Anglo-Saxon nations as a powerful factor in securing such a consensus by first establishing a con sensus of their own. The conception deserves not only to influence councils