This question therefore needs careful consideration, and a satisfactory answer can only be derived from an examination of the essential duty of the State.

If this duty consists in giving scope to the highest intellectual and moral development of the citizens, and in co-operating in the moral education of the human race, then the State’s own acts must necessarily conform to the moral laws.  But the acts of the State cannot be judged by the standard of individual morality.  If the State wished to conform to this standard it would often find itself at variance with its own particular duties.  The morality of the State must be developed out of its own peculiar essence, just as individual morality is rooted in the personality of the man and his duties towards society.  The morality of the State must be judged by the nature and raison d’etre of the State, and not of the individual citizen.  But the end-all and be-all of a State is power, and “he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle in politics.” [F]

[Footnote F:  Treitschke, “Politik,” i., p 3, and ii., p 28.]

Machiavelli was the first to declare that the keynote of every policy was the advancement of power.  This term, however, has acquired, since the German Reformation, a meaning other than that of the shrewd Florentine.  To him power was desirable in itself; for us “the State is not physical power as an end in itself, it is power to protect and promote the higher interests”; “power must justify itself by being applied for the greatest good of mankind.” [G]

[Footnote G:  Treitschke, “Politik,” i., p 3, and ii., p 28.]

The criterion of the personal morality of the individual “rests in the last resort on the question whether he has recognized and developed his own nature to the highest attainable degree of perfection.” [H] If the same standard is applied to the State, then “its highest moral duty is to increase its power.  The individual must sacrifice himself for the higher community of which he is a member; but the State is itself the highest conception in the wider community of man, and therefore the duty of self-annihilation does not enter into the case.  The Christian duty of sacrifice for something higher does not exist for the State, for there is nothing higher than it in the world’s history; consequently it cannot sacrifice itself to something higher.  When a State sees its downfall staring it in the face, we applaud if it succumbs sword in hand.  A sacrifice made to an alien nation not only is immoral, but contradicts the idea of self-preservation, which is the highest ideal of a State.” [I]

[Footnote H:  Ibid.]

[Footnote I:  Ibid., i., p 3.]