The World in Chains | Page 4

and
Greece was lured to destruction by the devil of Imperialism, whose
stock argument is to suggest that a State can extend its rights without
extending its obligations. But the limitation of the moral sphere by the
boundaries of the city is less apparent in the Greek States, because in
the historical period at least they were already in transition to a larger
view, and enlightened opinion certainly believed in a moral system
which should include all Greek States, to the exclusion of course of all
"barbarians": but this larger view was even more definitely limited, and
the demarcation of those within from those outside 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 Mediæval 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: epanorthôma 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 Mediæval 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