Thus the State, in co-operation with the whole community, becomes the educator of its people.  Standards of conduct are formed slowly in the best minds and exist at first merely in what Plato would have called “the intellectual sphere,” or in what would have been called at a later date in Palestine the “kingdom of heaven.”  But the strongest impulse of mankind is to realise its ideals.  Its fervent prayer, which once uttered can never cease, is “on earth as it is in heaven,” and the ideals developed in man’s spiritual life gradually take shape in laws and become prohibitions and injunctions backed by the forces of the State.

The State, however, is not an abstraction.  For English people it means the United Kingdom; and if an Englishman wants to realise what he owes to his country let him look back through its history and see how all that he values in the character of the men he most admires and all that is best in himself has gradually been created and realised through the ceaseless effort of his forefathers, carried on continuously from the time when the first Englishman crossed the North Sea until the present day.  Other nations have their types of conduct, perhaps as good as our own, but Englishmen value, and rightly value, the ideals particularly associated with the life of their own country.  Perhaps two of the commonest expressions convey peculiarly English views of character.  We talk of “fair play” as the essence of just dealing between man and man.  It is a conception we have developed from the national games.  We describe ideal conduct as that of a gentleman.  It is a condensation of the best part of English history, and a search for a definition of the function of Great Britain in the moral economy of the world will hardly find a better answer than that it is to stamp upon every subject of the King the character implied in these two expressions.  Suppose the British State to be overthrown or to drop from its place among the great Powers of the world, these ideals of character would be discredited and their place would be taken by others.

The justification of the constraint exercised by the State upon its own citizens is the necessity for security, the obligation of self-defence, which arises from the fact that outside the State there are other States, each endowed like itself with sovereignty, each of them maintaining by force its conception of right.  The power of the State over its own subjects is thus in the last resort a consequence of the existence of other States.  Upon the competition between them rests the order of the world.  It is a competition extending to every sphere of life and in its acute form takes the shape of war, a struggle for existence, for the mastery or for right.

IV.

ARBITRATION AND DISARMAMENT

To some people the place of war in the economy of nations appears to be unsatisfactory.  They think war wicked and a world where it exists out of joint.  Accordingly they devote themselves to suggestions for the abolition of war and for the discovery of some substitute for it.  Two theories are common; the first, that arbitration can in every case be a substitute for war, the second that the hopes of peace would be increased by some general agreement for disarmament.