the bandit refuses to co-operate. He does not offer an exchange; he wants to live as a parasite, to take by force, and give nothing in exchange. If he increased in numbers, co-operation between the various parts of the organism would be impossible; he makes for disintegration. He must be restrained, and so long as the police use their force in such restraint they are merely insuring co-operation. The police are not attempting to settle things by force; they are preventing things from being settled in that way.
Now, suppose that this police-force becomes the army of a political Power, and the diplomats of that Power say to a smaller one: "We outnumber you; we are going to annex your territory, and you are going to pay us tribute." And the smaller Power says: "What are you going to give us for that tribute?" And the larger replies: "Nothing. You are weak; we are strong; we gobble you up. It is the law of life; always has been—always will be to the end."
Now that police-force, become an army, is no longer making for co-operation; it has simply and purely taken the place of the bandits; and to approximate such an army to a police-force, and to say that because both operations involve the employment of force they both stand equally justified, is to ignore half the facts, and to be guilty of those lazy generalizations which we associate with savagery.52
But the difference is more than a moral one. If the reader will again return to the little sketch referred to above, he will probably agree that the diplomats of the larger Power are acting in an extraordinarily stupid