Co-ordination and federalism: My point may perhaps be made by saying that since society is essentially federal in nature, the body which seeks to impose the necessary unities must be so built that the diversities have a place therein. If it is true, as I have argued, that no association included the whole of myself, no association can legislate successfully for the whole of myself.
No body, therefore, that builds directly from me can co-ordinate the various relationships which radiate outwards from any individual save as those relationships have an organized connection with it. It is not, I thin , practicable to make that body a function of functions in the sense of building it from representatives elected by the various associations in society.
Such a body would be unwieldy and remote. It would settle questions that are not, in fact, germane to the spheres within which its members had worked prior to their choice as members. An engineering guild as such, for example, cannot have general views upon foreign policy, it can have views only upon engineering and such decisions in foreign policy as affect engineers as engineers.
The case for the territorial State is the final case that it moves beyond the partial glimpse to the wholeness into which those partial glimpses must be fitted. That wholeness is never perfect, never even adequate. But it is more likely, under conditions here outlined, to be effective than in an ad hoc body made from categories that are ultimately not less artificial than the territorial entities upon which we now depend, and it provides the one plane upon which men may meet under the conditions of an equality which alone gives validity to such ultimate solutions as we adopt.
But because society is federal, authority must be federal also. That involves, I have argued, the making of decisions out of the interests which will be effected by them, and, in turn, their application by those interests. It means making the mining industry a unit of administration in the same sense as Lancashire. It means surrounding the Ministry of Education With bodies entitled to speak on behalf of the parties to the educational process, and entities to be consulted because they are entitled to speak.
It means the abandonment of the sovereign State in the sense which equates the latter with society and gives it, thereby, the right to dictate to associations within Society. Because it, abandons the principle of sovereignty, it abandons the principle of hierarchy also. It does not envisage the allegiance of man as a series of concentric circles of which the great and all-embracing circle is the State. It sees him as bound now here, now there, as his experience seems to warrant in each problem that arises.
It insists that his ultimate allegiance is not to some collective entity outside himself, but to the ideals his experience has taught him in his conscience to accept. It makes decision his business and his choice. It does so because, otherwise, human values are largely lost, and we lose the sense of personal good which is, in the end, the most precious of all. For our achievements, to be real,must take place in the additions they make to the happiness of individual men and women, if they are to be lasting and substantial. It is no use adding to the glory of a Church save by securing the salvation of its members. It is no use enriching a society unless the citizens of that society share as individuals in the gain that is won.
It need not be denied that the organization which here emerges is immensely more complex than that which we have inherited. The grounds of complexity lie in the facts. Our civilization is for the most part built upon the assumption that power belongs to a few, and our institutions have been constructed to make those few retain their power. Largely, they are not democratic institutions, because they do not attempt to take account of the mass of experience affected by their working.
Their philosophy, in so far as they have a philosophy, is fringed about with theses derived from an earlier Stage of history when the common man could be disregarded by its processes. We are seeking different ends. By liberty we mean initiative for all men and not for some men, by equality we mean that each personality shall win such significance as it is entitled to, and not live as the servant of other personalities.
We cannot so widen the horizon of the State purpose without great changes. We are living in a world the processes of which are, in general, set by the experience of the French Revolution. Its validity is largely exhausted for ourselves, or, rather, its validity has been found applicable to a much wider experience than it was, at its apogee, able to survey. We have to make provision for that extension,
The principle which underlies the organization here envisaged is simple, even if its application is intricate. Postulating that ethical values are personal, and that each individual is entitled to act as his instructed conscience warrants him in acting, it finds the principle of social systems in the idea of function. By function it means the purpose aimed at by a body of men and women acting in concert. It argues that a function has validity, needs, therefore, recognition, because it grows naturally out of an experience they have proved for themselves.
It represents a want, the response to which means happiness. It does not argue that all functions can be reconciled into a synthesis which embraces them all. It admits that many are conflicting, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes through genuine and permanent incompatibility. It admits, also, the necessity of a scheme of co-ordination that will enable the uniformity to be administered which are necessary because men live together in large societies.
But it insists that the co-ordination shall grow from within, and not be imposed from without. It argues that the experience of no group of men is ever wide enough or true enough to make it possible for them to be entrusted, in any other way, with final powers. It agrees that a coercive authority is necessary, but it is distrustful of a coercive authority. It is distrustful because the psychological penumbra which surrounds coercion deadens those who exert it to the needs and wants of others.
It limits the experience which enters into the decision made. It is exercised for the advantage of the few who possess its instruments, or have access to those possessors. It narrows the validity of wants by equating the welfare of a few with the happiness of the community.
To attempt a creative co-ordination it erects the authority which co-ordinates a system of guarantees or limitations. That system, admittedly, is intricate. Its framework is a system of rights postulated as natural because experience has shown them to be the necessary conditions of a good life. A man, we argue, cannot be his best self if he is involved in a perpetual struggle to satisfy the barest minimum of physical appetites.
He must, therefore, win by his effort a sufficient wage, reasonable hours of labor, and such conditions of shelter as elevate his mind beyond wants otherwise sordid. But because his best self lives essentially in a spiritual world, his rights stretch beyond material necessity. He must interpret of and for himself what life seems to him to mean. His view of it is his low, and his isolation from his fellows means that do one can express it on his behalf.
He must, therefore, have freedom of speech that he may make that view heard, and freedom of association that he may join with others to give substance to it. He must have the right to share in the government of the society in which he is involved. To that end, first of all, the right to education is essential, for without it no man can formulate the meaning embodied in his experience of life.
He must also have the right to vote for those by whom he is to be governed, and, as a corollary thereto, the right to be chosen, if he can, as a governor by his fellows. But self government is not merely a matter of settling the character of the political fabric. Our lives are too much involved in the industrial vocation by which we live to admit of its nature being determined independently of our experience. Industrial democracy is, therefore, the necessary complement of political democracy.
Self-government in the one completes the process of self-government in the other. It will, from its nature involve a different type of organization. The ascent in it to power will be graded more steeply in terms of technical competence. It will leave less room for the popular virtues more opportunity for expertise. But the purpose to be served by the rights maintained in each is in substance identical.
These rights, it must be added, do not maintain themselves. It is the clear result of history that they cannot be maintained in a society of which the chief motive is a love of monetary gain. Unless there is approximate equality of property as between its different members, their rights will in the mass be merely relative to the property they possess. The chief social motive must, therefore, be service, and property must be the result of service in personal terms.
I must myself serve I must not live by owning what arises from the service of another. While this excludes, at any rate over any period it is necessary to discuss, a rigorous communism, it certainly involves a large transformation of the legal rights now annexed to property. It assumes that the production of those goods and services without which the society cannot live must be directly organized by the society. It assumes that all other production must, be carried out in terms of standards created and enforced as part of the minimum basis of civilized life.
Where it leaves private enterprise in control of some allotted field, ,it defines with some vigor the conditions within which that private enterprise may work. For it insists that in all productive effort the public is an unseen partner whose wishes must be respected in the deed of partnership. It will not, for instance, allow the private employer to hire or discharge his workers as he pleases. It will not allow him to preserve that secrecy in finance which now so perverts the character of industry.
Where capital is private, it argues that it has no more right to determine industrial policy, or to be the residuary legatee of industry, than the holders of the National Debt can justly determine foreign policy, or absorb some unwonted surplus in the Exchequer. It limits rigidly the rights of inheritance on the ground that no man is entitled to evade his contribution to the sum of social production. It believes that such a transnational of values, so far from destroying initiative and vigor, gives them opportunities of which, thus far in history, they have been rarely able to take advantage. It is confident that no other method gives the due weight to personality to which by its peculiar qualities it shows itself to be entitled.
Such a view as this involves a somewhat different attitude to liberty than that of the classical writers. It doesn’t regard freedom merely as absence of restraint. It agrees that once men live together in the great society, there develop necessary uniformity of conduct which limit the habits possible of expression. But it does not, either, find the meaning of liberty in obedience to a rule laid down by a few in the interest of an order which protects mainly those few.
Liberty in the social theory here urged means the exercise of initiative by each man in the attempt to secure the fulfillment of his best self. It means the guarantee of avenues through which that initiative may from its way to its appointed end. Obviously, therefore, liberty is inseparable from equality, since the a prion? distinctions which announce differences of access restrict the chance of liberty to a few fortunately situated persons in the State.
A society in which men are given an equal opportunity of self-realization is, also, a society in which there is justice. For by justice we mean, as in the famous definition, the rendering to each man of his own. It is such an ordering of social arrangements as will give the maximum guarantee available that the wants of each individual receive their due recognition in the totality of wants supplied. It is not suggested that such recognition is, or can be, perfect. The magnitude of our scale of life makes certain the presence of confusion and error. But at least we can advance beyond the inherent possibilities of the existing system.
Justice implies law, but the view of law here outlined involves an unconventional approach to its definition. Law is, as Vinograd off has said, I a set of rules directing the relation and conduct of their (the State’s) members. The important problem here is why the particular rules chosen are adopted, and how they work in the life of the society.
Laws as such we discern to be morally neutral they are merely. decisions which get accepted in the presence of social forces. We reject, that is to say, the view of km which regards it as just merely because of its source of origin. We even refuse to take as urgent in the estimate of its claim the fact that it proceeds from good intent. For good intent may be ignorant or mistaken.
It may come from a view of the facts too narrow to hope for adequacy. It may be blind to the extent of the forces it is its business to satisfy. For the end of law is the satisfaction of human wants. That means not the wants of a few, not the wants deemed right by those applying the law, but the totality of wants encountered by law. Law, therefore, to be justice, must be the expression of relations found adequate in the experience of men.
Who, it will be asked, are to act as judges of that adequacy ? There can, I think, be only one answer to that question. The judges are all of those who desire that their desires should be fulfilled, the body of members, that is, in the given society. Law therefore, to be found adequate must be built upon an induction from the widest possible experience it. can know.
It must attempt,in Miss Foilett’s happy phrase
“ The reciprocal fitting of needs one to the other.”
Once we begin that process of reciprocal adjustment, we move from the earlier sphere of contract to the sphere of status or relation. The movement of societies is then no longer one, as in Mahze’s view, from status to contract, but a movement from contract to relation. It is an endeavor to make rights and duties how from the functions involved. It makes, for instance, the liability of an employer dependent, not upon the thing he wills, but the will which experience deems to be involved in the relations occupied by an employer in the general social fabric.
In agency we interpret, not a contract of mandate, but a system of rights and duties which arise in the relation of principal and agent. This is a return to the basis of feudalism in distinction to the central notion of Roman law which seeks to give effect to the wills of the actors in the particular incident involved. What, of course, is important for us in this doctrine of relation is the proportionate power of the parties to it. We have, that is to say, in judging law not merely to regard the fact that interests are united, but also the way in which they are united. For that way, in tact, determines the relation reached. If one party is at an advantage over another, the substance of law is affected in its favor.
That is clear, for instance, in the game laws it is clear in the general foundations of the law of master and servant. It law is to represent a reciprocal fitting of needs, it cannot be right, as Acton said, that one party should have retained the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure in its own hands exclusively? Reciprocal fitting only takes place where there is equality of power between the parties to the adjustment.
If law, therefore, is to order human relationships rightly, it must be built upon a right induction from human experience But no such experience can be rightly interpreted unless it is systematically organized and systematically recorded For to co-ordinate the innumerable and often conflicting social interests into a sufficient wholeness for the purpose of order is the most subtle and delicate of all tasks.
We may premise that neither one man nor one class of men can hope to be sufficiently acquainted with their range and meaning, and that even less than in the past because of the high specialization involved in the division of labor. I would even suggest that no class is less fitted for this Co-ordination than the industrial class which, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has mainly performed it or controlled its performance. It is composed of men whose genius has been specialized to-the acquisition of fortune under the intricate conditions of a world market.
They tend, quite naturally, to look upon life merely or mainly as a conflict for wealth under terms which they only can fully understand because they have in fact framed them. What they mean by those terms has been well set out in the judgment of the court in Mogul Steamship Co. v.Mc. Gregor What in fact, it broadly implies is the absence of a social context in the business relation The industrial class will sell their service as they can and for what they can, and if public difficulty is involved in their activities, that is no concern of theirs.
If legislation attempts restraint upon those activities, there is no limit, as American experience plainly shows to the effort they will make either to annul or evade the Nothing in all this precludes the view that they are admirable husbands and model parents, or that they act as I have suggested on other than the highest ground. But because they are involved in a narrow circle of special interest, they are too limited in their view to grasp the multiform relation of which law must be the expression. They are unsuited, that is, to dominate the State. For their power to equate their partial experience with the total social need inevitably results, not in the making of effective adjustments, but in the undue precipitation of conflict.
That is why, as I have argued, only approximate equality of property will enable the individual to make his experience duly felt. That is why, also, his experience, as it associates itself with that of his fellows, needs organized relation to the State if the law is to be suffused with justice. For law is not found, but made. It is written out of the experience brought home to those who have its underestimation in their hands a They permeate it with the wants and desires which make themselves felt in the total push of social action. It is not the abstract outcome of judicial or legislative momentum.
Someone’s urgency has shaped it one way rather than another way. Its life, as Mr. Justice Holmes has finely said, is in its , experience and not its logic, and its inarticulate major premise has always been the will that has been powerful enough to inform that life. In the feudal period those so powerful were, mainly, the owners of land in our own day they are, mainly again, the holders of industrial capital. And because their wills represent only a part of the needs struggling for satisfaction, the law becomes biased against those whose speech, as law is formulated, goes unheard.
It loses authority because they do not recognize it as implicit with the substance also of their own desires. It fails to bind them to allegiance because what it ordains benefits, not themselves, but others. Only when it is based upon an induction to which each interest in the community has contributed does it truly co-ordinate, by creating a genuine, because general, satisfaction.
I say, therefore, that all’ men have an equal right to share in the making of law, and that only as our social arrangements make provision for that sharing will they win the loyalty of citizens. Otherwise, the rules accepted as law will be derived not from the co-coordinating authority we call the State, but from that group whose rules seem to one or more citizens a truer response to their needs. For the sharing is important to the sanction needed by the process of making law.
It enables us to find the methods by which we can interweave desires. It makes us in a position to grow our law out of the needs we totally confront, instead of dominating those needs by some special solution of which the substance is narrow and artisan. It makes the concepts of jurisprudence grow out of the facts of life, and thereby enables it the better to adjust itself to the changes in itself those facts will bring.
It enables us to supplement the special perspective of, the jurist by bringing him into contact with experiences and ideals from which his own environment is alien. I am arguing, broadly, that law has no moral appeal in any other terms. The legal order only makes itself valid by being the expression of the social order and the social order means not one only, but the whole of the myriad forces in our midst which are striving to fulfill their wants.
Here I may, perhaps, interpolate one remark. It is sometimes said that while the legal order is, as a rule, morally inferior to the ideals of a given period, it is always striving to make up its lost ground. The humanitarian temper, the power of equity, the compelling force of new facts, drive, so it is said, the legislature and the judge to adjust themselves to the growth of new needs. There is a real truth in this.
We have factory Acts at the height of the laisséz-faire period and the Lord Eldon who opposed every measure of social amelioration in Parliament was a great reforming judge, albeit but half-consciously, upon the Bench. I So, too, the pressure of business need has mitigated the irresponsibility of the State in the sphere of contract and the Conseil d’etat has ceased to protect the French government from its own blunders in those administrative courts which were held to transcend the rule of law. But this is still inadequate. It is, as a continuous process, too accidental and haphazard to make certain that the adjustments effected are as nearly various as the needs encountered.
Mr. Justice Holmes, for example, may be able to see that new ideas, involve constitutional experiment, but the majority of his colleagues upon the Supreme Court of the United States will remain limited by an experience inherently alien from the new ideas.
The London County Council may admit that it is a valuable experiment in education to make school-children Witness performances of Shakespeare’s plays but the absence of that novelty from the statutory definition of its powers will make the courts limit the concept of education to the earlier and mote formalist view.
That is why I have insisted on the systematic record and organization of experience. The co-coordinating authority may still be chosen by persons who are not differentiated as they choose by the vocations into which they enter. That absence of differentiation is, I think, essential because it is simple, and involves the territorial basis of government. But the groups we encounter in social and industrial life need to be federally related to the government if the decisions of the latter body are to be wise.
That means, I have urged, giving to those groups the means of prior and organic influence with government before it pronounces upon the problems of co-ordination. It means weighing their opinions, seeking their criticisms, meeting their Special needs. It means, further, allowing them responsibility in their own life, the responsibility which comes from power over their intimate affairs.
It means that Manchester can have a municipal theatre without Parliamentary sanction. It means, also, that (I use for the moment, a neutral term) the governing body of the mining industry can force upon its constituents, if it so desire, a pension scheme for miners over and above the national old age pension.
It means, broadly speaking, less direct administration by the State and a more flexible application of its statutes in terms of the varying situations to which they apply. It conceives, accordingly, of State-statutes as minimum solutions, and leaves to the interests they affect, as these are organized, the power and hot seldom, the duty of adding to them. The result will be a more intricate world but it will be the better because its activities will have the chance of creative adventure.
Above all, it may be suggested, it will make, and for the first time, the co-coordinating work of the State a matter of principle. It will not say, as now, that somehow order must be preserved, and that the State is simply the body to which the keeping of order is entrusted.
For the keeping of order, unimportant as it is, may subordinate to itself all that is worth while in the purposes of society and a State which is informed mainly or wholly by that desire will use its power to dwarf the moral stature of its citizens. For it cannot be too often insisted that power is poisonous to those who exercise it unless their authority is checked always by urgent criticism, and, if need be, in the end by resistance
That power,granted the weapons now lat its disposal, is so vast that it can easily,in , the effort after certainty, destroy all that there is of individual in men. It tends, unless we are vigilant, to assume that silence means contentment, and that disturbance implies, not research into the grievance that it indicates, but punishment for the excess its form has assumed. It keeps men uninspired and uniform, inert and ignorant.
It can, as in per-revolutionary Russia, literally make a desert and call it peace. So used, power is the more disastrous because it merely postpones the day of reckoning. The absence from it of a larger purpose makes its organs the subjects of a conflict for the spoils they promise. They are then attacked from within and a like their defenders and their opponents will seek the support of those outside the ranks of authority by appealing to them in the name of principles until then forgotten. Because the minds of men are responsive to noble desires, such appeal will not be made in vain.
The State here outlined is not I think, so liable to these defects. It can claim that it performs a natural function. It is built to defend the civic minimum of rights without which, as I argued earlier no man can hope to be his best self. It has no exact boundaries to the area it occupies, for life cannot be contained w thin categories of mathematical precision. It cannot even define itself those boundaries at any given moment of action in a prion terms. That does not mean that its function is any the less real, for any given purpose has to grow into, to make adjustments with, other purposes, in order to fulfill its end.
The State protects the wholeness of men over and above those parts which express themselves through groups more specific in character. It does not do so by being something over and above them. It co-ordinates with them by associating itself with them, by becoming a means through which they reach a general medium of expression. To that end, it seeks to embody the largest induction open to it.
It speaks, not for some, but for all, It decides, not for a few, but for the whole. It includes experience and does not exile experience. It is, for instance, legitimate for the Roman Catholic Church to deny salvation to all outside its membership: that is the condition of its being.
But a State must secure temporal salvation for all who own its citizenship. It can do so only by counting as equal in worth the personalities of its citizens. For it, on this plane, there must be neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free. It must compound its notions of general well-being from the total environment it encounters.
In such fashion the State might become a genuine search for social integration. It might cease to be the organ of a few because its will would become instinct with the desires of the many. It would be responsive, not to the purposes of those whose power makes their demands immediately urgent, but to all who have an individuality they would preserve and enlarge.
They would be able to make their desires articulate. They would be able to feel that their desires were weighed, not in terms of the economic pressure they represent, but the social value they embody. Their experience of life, their sense of the meaning it has for themselves, would be taken into account. Such a State might be the true organ of a community, the meeting-ground on which its varied purposes found the means of a unity adequate for its general enrichment.
It would not impose a uniform rule. It would recognize that the material is too diverse to permit of such simplicity. It could be taken as suffused with good faith in a sense in which the State in our own day is void of such virtue.I It will be less safe, doubtless, in the sense that its pronouncements of right will be more hardly won, and less inertly accepted, than is now the case. But that is likely to make it more carefulness the making of its rules, at once more scrupulous in building their foundations, and more elastic in fitting them to the forces they seek to control.
But all this will hold only on two conditions. The State that is to achieve an ambition so high must begin by organizing criticism of itself. It must posit fallibility as its foundation. It industrialist that what it does is not right because it has willed to do it, but right because it works.And it can know that its will works justly only by the estimation of its results in the lives of those affected by them.
Such knowledge means two things. It means, first of all, a citizen body alert to the errors of government. Its members must be so disciplined in mind that they can appreciate the synthesis made, can also directly contribute themselves to its making. A State in which the art of politics is, in its general terms, apprehended -only by a few can never enrich the lives of the many.
For it can never genuinely know the wants of the many. It can only roughly imagine those wants by assuming their identity with the wants of its own directors. That identity is an unproven hypothesis, unproven because, predominantly, it is untrue.
And the degree of its ignorance is the measure of the misinterpretation it will make. Because, therefore, that knowledge is so precious to it, the life-blood of the State is freedom of speech. To set boundaries to the effort of the mind is always, at least ultimately, to frustrate that effort.
To stigmatize inconvenient thought as sedition, or blasphemy, or evil is, sooner or later, to stifle thought itself. Inconvenient thought rarely means other than unconventional thought, and. unconventional thought is the parent of social discovery.
The second condition is that we take increasing opportunity to improve the quality of the information upon which we act. Our decisions are not taken in a vacuum. What ever we do has its outcome in actions which may affect myriads of human lives. The picture in a statesman’s head, say of the intentions of Japan, may be the little increment which tips the beam towards peace or war. We have to analyses our environment, to measure the results of that environment.
We have to transcend our self-centered experience, and the prejudices to which it gives rise, by externalizing by making as objective as we can, the pictures of the world about us. We want, for instance, statistics of miners wages hot statistics of the mine-isomers view of miners wages, and statistics of the miners view all that we derive from these ere arguments to strengthen a decisis we had already decided to make without them. Self-interest can only be persuaded from its subjectivity as it meets that audit by record Which reveals its patent self hood.
We are deceived by press and party, by Church and State, because we lack the machinery of co-ordinates knowledge. We do not know the meaning of our activities because we do not in any serious way attempt to record them. Yet without that record the conflicts of modern social life are but a blind groping in a darkened room.
I neither suggest nor believe that such a political system as this is likely to resolve our doubts and difficulties in a tine way. Life is a kinetic thing, and the solutions we make only give rise to new problems. We create desires by satisfying desires. But I believe that such a State might hope, as it has not now the right to hope, to get its decisions accepted. It might claim to have gathered to itself a Larger volume of experience deeply felt end carefully measured than in any previous time.
It would have left a larger room for individual action and corporate action than the highly unified State of which we are now seeing the slow erosion. It would have bound to itself that passionate loyalty which comes to a great leader when men and in his words the echo of the song in their own hearts.
Yet it will not always get its decisions accepted. Man is nature’s rebel, and it is his habit to protest against the will that seeks to bind his will. Where there is refusal of consent. we must not assume, whatever the character of government, that such refusal is wrong. Grievance never proceeds to rebellion unless it is deeply grounded in a sense of wrong. Grievance is never adequately met by suppression of its symptoms, Whatever the-form and substance of the State, the judgment upon its policy, the resolution of conflict where it meets antagonism, remain a matter for the individual mind. It is there only that effective choices can be made.
It is there only that allegiance arises from conviction. Athanasius is not reconciled by the issue of a command he makes his peace by finding that the legal order can be so adjusted as to embody what he desires. The possibility, in every situation, that Athanasius may be right can only be overlooked when we prefer authority to truth, and the habit of such preference is, ultimately, to prefer ourselves to authority.
That is the certain highroad to anarchy. For the real destruction of a social order arises, not free the existence of passionate dissent,but from the determination to refuse to dissent the opportunity of satisfaction and that refusal is, as a rule, ground for the suspicion that dissent has right upon its side.
Whatever hes here been said of the internal relations oi a State holds also, with no less emphasis, of its external context. The nation-State is not the final unit of social organization. Its power as a sovereign body represents a phase only of historic experience, and the pressure of world forces has already made its sovereignty obsolete for any creative purpose. The nation-State is entitled to autonomy in all concerns of which the incidence is obviously local, but immediately what it wants and does impinges upon the interests of the larger world outside, its will is only one of -many factors which must go to the making of a decision.
It may choose its own Prime Minister it is not entitled to settle the scale of its armament. It may dig its own coal but it is not entitled so,to pick and choose in the marketing of its coal that it deliberately prejudices the interests of other nation States. The conditions, particularly: economic, of modern civilization demand the habit of organized international co-operation.
We can only secure that habit by building institutions through which it may grow to its appointed purpose. Such institutions are incompatible with the existence of States which assert their will independently of the will of others The incompatibility is the greater because, too often, the range of experience upon which that Will is based is so narrow es in fact to traverse the needs therein implied. We can only remedy the danger that State Power suffers perversion in the sphere of international affairs by making that State the subject of a control beyond itself
We need not postulate, for that end, the obsolete fiction of State equality. But we must at least assure to States, whatever their size, that their claims are met in terms of right and hot in terms of force. War, therefore, must be outlawed and the whole effort of civilization must be directed against those States which trust to war as the instruments of their purpose.
That implies a federal organization of States, a will built from the integrating of interests in conference. It means, doubtless, the subordination of the great State to ends outside itself, and it will be difficult to win the surrender of their prestige. Yet no other way lies open to us if we are to prevent war on the one hand, and, on the other, to secure economic justice between peoples