The World in Chains | Page 4

the moral sphere was never more sharply conceived, than in the difference commonly held to exist between Greeks and Barbarians. Yet even so Greece can maintain her pre-eminence in thought; for Plato and Euripides at least glimpsed the conception, by which we do not yet consent to be guided, of the moral equality of all mankind.[3]
For all these reasons the City State as a limited moral sphere is better seen perhaps in Medi?val Italy, where, I imagine, a Florentine might kill a native of Pisa whenever he liked; whereas if he killed a fellow Florentine he risked at least the necessity of putting himself outside the moral sphere, of having that is to leave Florence and stay in Pisa till the incident was forgotten.[4]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Even Aristotle probably had some suspicion of it; so in his anxiety to justify the institution of slavery he had to make out that slaves were not men at all but only machines.]
[Footnote 4: Duelling might be classified theoretically as a survival of the wolfish condition sketched in § 5. But the persistent institution of single combat should not be regarded as in itself a survival, but rather as an outlet for the surviving instinct, a concession justified by political or social considerations that vary from age to age. Even Plato in his Republic (465 A) agreed that the citizen might in certain circumstances take the law into his own hands, probably regarding such action as a sort of equity, what Aristotle calls [Greek: epanorth?ma nomou êlleipei dia ton katholou], a rectification of certain special cases not covered by law.
In modern states again, e.g. in Austria and Germany, duelling is not so much a survival as a corollary of militarism, which involves a fetichistic veneration of the military uniform or of military "honour."]
§ 8
The Nations of Europe ferae naturae
In the next and latest stage in the expansion of the moral system we find it again conterminous with the frontiers of the State. But it is now no longer the small city state of Ancient Greece and Medi?val Italy, but the large political unit, roughly and hypothetically national,[5] which constitutes the modern State, whether Kingdom, Republic, or Empire. I have called this the latest stage in the extension of the sphere of morality because it is the one which actually prevails and limits our national conduct. For the paradox of legal murder and massacre in the modern world is resolved as soon as we realise that war is a conflict between two or more isolated moral systems, each of which only regards violence as a crime to be suppressed within the limits of its own validity. International warfare in its crudest form is only a manifestation of the original wolfish state of man, the "state of nature" which exists between two moral agents who have no moral obligation to each other (but only to themselves). The fact that the primitive savage was an individual moral agent having no moral obligation to anyone but himself, while the modern fighting nation is a moral agent of who knows how many millions, does not alter the essential character of the conflict.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: See below, Chapter IV, § 4. Nationalism True and False.]
§ 9
The Convenience of Diplomacy
As a matter of fact this original wolfish attitude of nations is already obsolete, if it ever existed. The expansion and growth of political and moral relations is a gradual process, and the fact that for the sake of brevity and clearness we fix and describe certain arbitrary points in that process must not be taken to imply that it is discontinuous. Anyhow there is no doubt that the specifically wolfish attitude of one nation to another can hardly be found in its pure state, being already tempered and mitigated by the practice and custom of diplomacy: and this diplomatic mitigation, however superficial, does something to break down that windowless isolation which is the essential cause of violence between two independent moral entities. Pacificists of the democratic school sometimes present a fallacious view of international diplomacy, and almost imply that the present war was made inevitable by the fact that Viscount Grey was educated at Harrow, or that peace could have been preserved with Germany if only Sir Edward Goschen had begun life as a coal heaver, or had at least been elected by the National Union of Boilermakers. Their panacea they vaguely call the democratic control of Foreign Affairs, though it is not clear why we should expect twenty million still ignorant voters to be more enlightened than one educated representative who is, as a matter of fact, usually so much oppressed by a due sense of his responsibility that he is in danger of bungling only from excessive timidity. The experience of the Law Courts shows that twelve men, be they never