As time has developed the nations of today, it has come to be understood by hard-headed statesmen that those who conduct their respective affairs can have no other guiding principle than the interest of their own State, no other.

There is a persistent feeling throughout the world that there is an analogy between the individual man and organized society.  There are books written to show that States must and do pass through the various stages through which an individual passes, namely, infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, decay.  By a perfectly natural parallel the majority of men apply the same morality to the State which they apply to the individual, and they insist upon it that a State must be moral in every respect; that it must have a conscience; that it must have virtue; that it must practice self-denial; that it must not lay its hands on what does not belong to it.  In short, that it must as a State or as a nation be “good,” in exactly the same sense in which a person is “good.”  In other words, they personify the State.

I have never heard of any speaker or writer who would not approve of that as an ideal, and who would not desire that the millennium should come upon earth now, and that exactly the same virtues that are held up for personal ideals should be held up for national ideals.

I think we all believe that, but, as a matter of fact, in a world constituted as ours is, the one test of a good Government, applied by every individual, is the material prosperity of the people who live under it, and for that reason if the people do not at first put in power men who can give them material prosperity they will put such failures out and try another set of rulers, and they will go on and on that way until necessarily the policies of statesmen must be based upon the interest of that State whose destinies are in their hands.  So that the only hope of relations between nations similar to those that exist between good men and good women is that the individuals of that nation, its population, its inhabitants, should consent to exercise the self-denying virtues; and until that point is reached there can be no good State in the sense in which there can be a good man.  We ought all to work for it, but it is not here now, and there are no signs on the horizon of its approach.

In a war, therefore, every statesman studies the resources of his nation, and when the time comes that it is manifestly his duty to put an end to warfare, it is only by the public approval that he dares do it, by showing that it is to their advantage to give up the things for which they went to war, in greater or less degree.

Armed Peace Not Disarmament.

And the man of shrewd insight, who knows when that point is reached, is the leader who saves the face, so to speak, of these nations and steps in and says: 

“Now, the whole moral force of the civilized world must be brought to bear upon you to make a peace, the terms of which, if possible, shall not discredit any of you, but at the same time shall be as elastic and as proportionate to your respective gains and losses as will insure at least a considerable period of peace, not an armistice, not an armed armistice, though it may be an armed peace.”