RELATIVE EQUALITY TO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION. 561 



self-governing and self-supporting. The doctrine of the Balance of Power, it is 

 true, was by no means new at the Peace of Westphalia; still less at the Treaty 

 of Utrecht, when the name came into use. But many circumstances in the then 

 condition of Europe lent to it an importance which it had not formerly possessed ; 

 whilst, by the institution of Permanent Embassies, which may be roughly ascribed 

 to the same period, it was hoped that it might be worked out in practice in such 

 a manner as to render every State that was admitted into the family of nations 

 substantially responsible for the existence and independence of every other. 



For our present purposes, then, we may assume that for two centuries, more 

 or less, men have been striving after external organisation ; and we need go no 

 farther than the events of the last few years to convince ourselves that they have 

 striven in vain ; for never was there a period in the history of civilisation when 

 the mutual obligations of independent communities were less recognised and acted 

 on than at the present time. The common empire of the middle ages, never 

 realised it is true, but never abandoned — the common church, realised beyond 

 most human conceptions — the common language and literature which bound 

 together the cultivated classes, — all these have been swept away, and have found, 

 as yet, no substitutes. Dissimilar in their creeds and their institutions, their 

 blood and their speech, the different nations of Europe, now thoroughly severed 

 in all but their material interests, far from cherishing the sympathies of a common 

 citizenship, scarcely exhibit those of common humanity. Armed to the teeth with 

 the most ingenious weapons of destruction — weapons which in the end can avail 

 only to the strongest — the full publicity and the rapid transmission of intelligence, 

 from which so many humanising results were anticipated, seem as yet to have 

 served scarcely any purpose but to enable rival nations to watch each other with 

 ever-growing feelings of jealousy and distrust. 



With such an experience of the fruitlessness of past effort it is not wonderful 

 if, at times, we feel tempted to abandon all attempts at international organisation 

 and mutual aid, and vaguely to hope that whilst separate States maintain the 

 most absolute political independence, those indefinite influences to which we give 

 the names of civilised opinion, moral pressure, and the like, may play amongst 

 independent nations a part with which the most highly cultivated and most 

 Christian communities would be very sorry to entrust them within their own 

 borders. Yet within the State, these influences operate more potently than with- 

 out it, because citizens know what fellow-citizens mean. If within the State, then, 

 these influences become efficacious only by perfecting organisation, and thus assert- 

 ing the dominion of order more unequivocally and emphatically, what reason- 

 able hope can we entertain, that, in the great world without they will become 

 self-acting and supply, the place of order altogether ? To invoke them for such a 

 purpose, is surely little better than to hide from ourselves, by a cloud of words, a 

 despair to which these very words bear witness the moment that we attempt 



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