There is yet another cause of uncertainty.  The moral consciousness of the same people alters with the changing ideas of different epochs and schools of philosophy.  The established law can seldom keep pace with this inner development, this growth of moral consciousness; it lags behind.  A condition of things arises where the living moral consciousness of the people conflicts with the established law, where legal forms are superannuated, but still exist, and Mephistopheles’ scoffing words are true: 

“Laws are transmitted, as one sees,
Just like inherited disease. 
They’re handed down from race to race,
And noiseless glide from place to place. 
Reason they turn to nonsense; worse,
They make beneficence a curse! 
Ah me!  That you’re a grandson you
As long as you’re alive shall rue.”

          
                                            Faust (translation by Sir T. Martin).

Thus, no absolute rights can be laid down even for men who share the same ideas in their private and social intercourse.  The conception of the constitutional State in the strictest sense is an impossibility, and would lead to an intolerable state of things.  The hard and fast principle must be modified by the progressive development of the fixed law, as well as by the ever-necessary application of mercy and of self-help allowed by the community.  If sometimes between individuals the duel alone meets the sense of justice, how much more impossible must a universal international law be in the wide-reaching and complicated relations between nations and States!  Each nation evolves its own conception of right, each has its particular ideals and aims, which spring with a certain inevitableness from its character and historical life.  These various views bear in themselves their living justification, and may well be diametrically opposed to those of other nations, and none can say that one nation has a better right than the other.  There never have been, and never will be, universal rights of men.  Here and there particular relations can be brought under definite international laws, but the bulk of national life is absolutely outside codification.  Even were some such attempt made, even if a comprehensive international code were drawn up, no self-respecting nation would sacrifice its own conception of right to it.  By so doing it would renounce its highest ideals; it would allow its own sense of justice to be violated by an injustice, and thus dishonour itself.

Arbitration treaties must be peculiarly detrimental to an aspiring people, which has not yet reached its political and national zenith, and is bent on expanding its power in order to play its part honourably in the civilized world.  Every Arbitration Court must originate in a certain political status; it must regard this as legally constituted, and must treat any alterations, however necessary, to which the whole of the contracting parties do not agree, as an encroachment.  In this way every progressive change is arrested, and a legal position created which may easily conflict with the actual turn of affairs, and may check the expansion of the young and vigorous State in favour of one which is sinking in the scale of civilization.