civilization. But civilization tends slowly but surely to substitute for war in the later stages of this process the methods of law, or, in any case, methods which, while not always unobjectionable, avoid the necessity for any breach of the peace.1 As soon, indeed, as in primitive society two individuals engage in a dispute which they are compelled to settle not by physical force but by a resort to an impartial tribunal, the thin end of the wedge is introduced, and the ultimate destruction of war becomes merely a matter of time. If it is unreasonable for two individuals to fight it is unreasonable for two groups of individuals to fight.2
The difficulty has been that while it is quite easy for an ordered society to compel two individuals to settle their differences before a tribunal, in accordance with abstractly determined principles of law and reason, it is a vastly more difficult matter to compel two groups of individuals so to settle their differences. A large part of the history of all the great European countries has consisted in the progressive conquest and pacification of small but often bellicose states outside, and even inside, their own borders.3 This is the case even within a community. Hobbes, writing in the midst of a civil war, went so far as to lay down that the "final cause" of a commonwealth is nothing else but the abolition of "that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe." Yet we see to-day that even within our highly civilized communities there is not always any adequately awful power to prevent employers and employed from engaging in what is little better than a civil war, nor even to bind them to accept the decision of an impartial tribunal they may have been persuaded to appeal to. The smallest state can compel its individual citizens to keep the peace; a large state can compel a small state to do so; but hitherto there has been no guarantee possible that large states, or even large compact groups within the state, should themselves keep the peace. They commit what injustice they please, for there is no visible power to keep