RELATIVE EQUALITY TO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION. 5G5 



principle which guided the negotiators at Miinster in the reconstruction of the old 

 Empire, the German Empire, as it had come to be called. The Empire, or rather 

 the Confederation which they constituted, recognised and gave effect to the rela- 

 tive importance of the various states, by means of a complicated, but not on that 

 account an inefficient mechanism. The good as well as the evil of feudality 

 still clung to it, as it did to the society to which it professed to correspond. 

 The earlier schemes of general European organisation were modelled on that 

 of this central body, and, consequently, they exhibit the principle of equality 

 less conspicuously than the later ones. But absolute citizen equality was the 

 principle which the American, and, above all, the French Revolution, brought 

 into prominence, and sought to substitute for the arbitrary and impassable 

 barriers between class and class into which feudalism had degenerated, and 

 which constituted the false element of finality in national organisation, social 

 and political. As international politics came under the influence of these 

 events, this false principle exhibited itself more and more. Since the Congress of 

 Vienna the tendency has been to temper equality only by exclusion; and either 

 to limit the seats at the European council board to the five great powers — the 

 so-called " Pentarchy" — amongst whom absolute equality was the rule, or, if the 

 lesser powers were admitted, to admit them, nominally at least, on the same footing. 

 But is the principle of absolute equality of rights and obligations between 

 States that are unequal in importance really false in theory and unrealisable in 

 practice ? We are willing, you will say, to admit the absurdity of attempting to 

 stereotype the map of Europe : but as to the possibility, or propriety, of recognis- 

 ing absolute political equality, whether within the State or without, there is, at 

 any rate, much diversity of opinion. 



Now this diversity of opinion — great as it is, and terrible as have been, and I 

 fear may yet be, its effects — is traceable, if I am not greatly mistaken, to a defect 

 in the popular mind, on which Aristotle, with his usual perspicacity, had put 

 his finger more than 2000 years ago. " The vulgar," he says, " do not dis- 

 tinguish." And in this modern Europe of ours, for nearly a century now, they 

 have lost sight of a distinction which Aristotle did them the farther favour to 

 point out to them. The distinction to which I refer is that between absolute^ and 

 relative or proportional, equality. 



The two are, in truth, neither more nor less than two different manifestations 

 of the principle of justice. They differ not in themselves, but in the manner of 

 their application, and in the subject-matter with which they deal. 



Following, and giving definiteness, as usual, to Plato's conception of what, 

 in its origin, was probably the teaching of Socrates on the subject, Aristotle 

 gave to these two forms of applied justice the names of the StopOuyriKov Sikcuov 

 and the SiavewriKov SIkcuov, — names which the schoolmen and jurists rendered, 



VOL. XXIV. PART III. 7 O 



