It is evidently quite impossible for me to present here a full formal refutation of these positions.  I will therefore content myself with brief demurrers.  To the argument from social evolution I would reply that evolution knows no finality of type, and that the presumption lies in favour of those who hold that the centripetal or co-operative powers, which have forged the national state out of the smaller social unities, are not exhausted, but are capable of carrying the organizing process further.  To those who rely upon the authority of history, citing the collapse of the experiments in federation which followed the Congress of Vienna as proof that similar experiments will similarly fail to-day or to-morrow, I reply that this view is based on a false interpretation of the statement that ‘history repeats itself’.  A psychological or sociological experiment is not the same when fundamental changes have taken place in the psychical and social conditions.  We have already recognized that the nineteenth century has seen a series of vital changes in the economic and spiritual structure of civilization.  The evidence of 1815 cannot, therefore, be conclusive as regards the possibilities of 1915.  To those who insist on the sovereignty and independence of the national state as an eternal verity, I will make no further reply than to say that such language has for me no more meaning than talk of ‘the divine right of kings’, ‘the natural rights of man’, or any other phrase of the abracadabra of metaphysical politics.  The actual world in which we live knows no such absolutes.  Sovereignty and independence, like all other legal claims, are subject to modification and compromise.  Every bargain made by treaty or agreement with another state, every acceptance of international law or custom, involves some real diminution of sovereign independence, unless indeed the liberty to break all treaties and to violate all laws is expressly reserved as an inalienable right of nations.  Moreover, within the limits of a single nation, sovereignty is itself divided and distributed.  Alike in the United States of America, the Swiss Republic, and the German Empire, the constituent states as well as the nations are recognized as sovereign, possessing certain rights or powers safeguarded by the constitution against all encroachments of the central or federal government.  So again within the state itself, the sovereignty is often no longer concentrated in a single person or a single body of persons, but is exercised by the joint action of several organs, as in Great Britain, where the king and the Houses of Parliament are the joint administrators of the sovereignty of the state.  Sovereignty thus becomes more and more a question of degree and of adjustment.  International lawyers will doubtless insist that neither treaties nor international laws involve any derogation of sovereign powers.  But when the substantial liberties of action are curtailed by any binding agreement, the unimpaired sovereignty is an idle abstraction.