attainment, sine qua non, because it is only amongst recognised States that it is proposed to attempt it, and States are recognised only when they are organised. International organisation thus assumes the presence of the object which it seeks, and the conclusion in favour of its necessity resolves itself into a petitio principii. But the presence of fallacy in this objection becomes suspicious when we reflect that precisely the same objection may be made to the realisation of municipal organisation, and indeed of positive law in every direction. If international organisation requires organised States, municipal organisation requires organised citizens; and yet it is for the organisation of citizen life, and not for its own sake, that we seek to realise and develop national organisation. The condition of its existence is thus identified with its object, just as in the former case. The key to the apparent paradox, in both cases, is to be found in the law of action and reaction which governs the relation between civilisation and organisation. Each is alternately cause and effect. Savages are incapable of municipal organisation beyond its most rudimentary stages; and yet it is by means of municipal organisation that men cease to be savages.

Again, the value of the means diminishes as the end is neared, and vanishes with its attainment. Perfection in municipal organisation would cut off the necessity for international organisation no doubt; because perfectly organised communities would fall into their own places spontaneously

would voluntarily recognise their respective duties, and render the vindication of their rights superfluous. There would be no abnormal relations. The more nearly com

munities approach perfection, the more nearly will this phenomenon be exhibited. But the same takes place in the case of progressive persons or progressive citizens, till with their perfection the function of positive law-private and public-disappears. The spirit supersedes the letter. Practically, however, in the case of States, as of persons or citizens, it is with a period of transition that we have to do; and a point will be reached in the sphere of international jurisprudence, just as it has been reached in the sphere of municipal jurisprudence, at which States are civilised enough to admit of organisation by means of positive law, and not civilised enough to dispense with it. Nor is there any reason to suppose that this will be a brief and transitory halting-point. On the contrary, as it is the normal, and, so far as experience has yet gone, the permanent position of civilised citizens, there seems every probability that it will be the ultimate position of civilised States. With the further question, whether or not it be within the power of humanity to transcend the conditions of its previous existence, and to shake off the fetters of positive law altogether, we need not trouble ourselves. Ideal States are as far removed from us as ideal citizens; and, as at present constituted, we can progress in the direction of either of them, only by such measured action and counter-action as shall enable us to supplement each other's shortcomings, and to correct each other's defects.

But progress in the direction of the ideal by means of mutual aid, regulated by positive law, though possible within the State may be impossible beyond it; the ultimate problem of international jurisprudence, whilst demonstrably inevitable,

may be demonstrably insoluble. The science of jurisprudence, when prosecuted in the direction of the law of nations, may end in a reductio ad absurdum. This consideration brings before us the next proposition which we are called upon to discuss.

CHAPTER II.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT INSOLUBLE.

The realisation of a jural organism within the sphere of the international relations, which shall embrace the three factors of positive law, is not impossible.

There are two kinds of impossibility, either of which may call for the abandonment of a political scheme-the one absolute and permanent, the other relative and temporary. Impossibilities of the former class exist wherever the scheme in question involves an unfounded assumption either of a fact or of a law of nature, or has for its object the reversal or modification of such fact or law. To schemes of this class. belong all social and political projects which assume the equality of men or of States, whether as facts already existing, or as objects attainable by human effort. Men are not, and never will be equal: their equalisation is not within the reach of human will: and as the inequalities of classes and the inequalities of States are the direct and necessary results of the inequalities of individuals, they are equally certain and equally permanent. However fondly the dream.

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of equality may be cherished by the envious or the vain, whether it be manifested as an individual or a national aspiration, it is a chimera as unrealisable as the union of the head of a woman with the tail of a fish. To the same category of absolute impossibilities belong all schemes which, in this changing world, assume as existing, or seek to establish, permanent relations of superiority or inferiority, whether between individuals, or classes, or States, in place of accepting as their basis the facts presented by the contemporary history of mankind. Lastly, if we accept the optimistic postulate on which all jurisprudence rests-viz., that the universe, as a whole, is an ethical as well as a physical kosmos-then every scheme which does not seek ethical ends by ethical means must be ultimately unrealisable. It is a pessimist alone who can believe in the stability of any arrangement which does not recognise the reciprocity of rights and duties, and the necessary interdependence of all coexisting political entities. Rights and duties are the woof and the warp that weave the social weft, and the chief cause of failure in all ages and in every department of human effort has been the reluctance of mankind to recognise

"Wie Alles sich zum Ganzen webt."

If the action of ethical laws be as inevitable as the action of physical laws, it is as impossible to realise an anti-ethical scheme of government, whether from a despotic or a democratic point of view, as it is to interrupt the succession of day and night.

It is to this category of absolute impossibilities that I shall

endeavour to reduce all proposals for the realisation of a system of positive international law which either fail to accept the facts of nature as they are phenomenally presented to us, or which do not seek to curb the anti-ethical tendencies which these facts exhibit.

But what if this proposal should itself belong to the same category? What if the realisation of a jural organism within. the sphere of the international relations should be shut out by permanent facts and laws? What if the domain of ethics under which personal and citizen relations fall, should stop at the borders of the State? In this case, however mournfully I might feel that its abandonment involved, so far as I could see, the permanent acceptance of international anarchy, I should unhesitatingly recognise the futility of all further discussion of the problem with which we are here occupied. I could not even dare to dream with Dante of universal empire, or to pray for the advent of Hobbes's Leviathan. The triumph of Nihilism would be the solution of the ultimate problem. But Nihilism fortunately does not rise to the level even of those half-truths which rest on onesided conceptions of the human relations. It is a denial of these relations altogether; it has no element of cohesion, and the realisation of a nihilistic organism is as inconceivable as the existence of a web that had neither woof nor warp. In theory it is nonsense, and in practice it is crime.

However insuperable, then, may be the difficulties which for the present stand in the way of cosmopolitan organisation along ethical lines, though its realisation in the existing conditions of humanity may belong to the second category of