“According to the current ideas of our civilisation, a great part of the lives which are being lived and have been lived by mankind are not lives worth living, in the sense of embodying qualities for which life seems valuable to us. This being so, it seems to follow that the object of our ethical idea of humanity is not really mankind as a single community. Putting aside the impossibilities arising from succession in time, we see that no such identical experience can be pre-supposed in all mankind as is necessary to effective membership of a common society and exercise of a general will.” [50] Though a subtle qualification follows, based on the duty of States to recognise humanity, not as a fact but as a type of life, “and in accordance with it to recognise and deal with the rights of alien individuals and communities,” the real upshot of this line of thought is to emphasise the ethical self-sufficiency of a nation and to deny the validity of any practical standard of the conduct of nations towards one another, at any rate so far as the relations between higher and lower, or Eastern and Western, nations are concerned.
This view is stoutly supported by some sociologists and statesmen from the juridical standpoint. There can, we are told, be no real “rights” of nations because there exists no “sanction,” no recognised tribunal to define and enforce rights. The legal rigour of this position I am not greatly concerned to question. It may here suffice to say that the maintenance under ordinary conditions of treaty relations, international credit and exchange, a common postal, and within narrower limits, a common railway system, not to mention the actual machinery of conventions and conferences for concerted international action, and the whole unwritten law of war and international courtesies, embassies, consulates, and the like – all these things rest upon a basis of recognition of certain reciprocal duties, the neglect or violation of which would be punished by forfeiture of most favoured nations’ treatment in the future, and by the reprobation and the possibly combined intervention of other States.