at Britain in the moral economy of the world will hardly
find a better answer than that it is to stamp upon every subject of the
King the character implied in these two expressions. Suppose the British
State to be overthrown or to drop from its place among the great Powers
of the world, these ideals of character would be discredited and their
place would be taken by others.

The justification of the constraint exercised by the State upon its own
citizens is the necessity for security, the obligation of self-defence,
which arises from the fact that outside the State there are other
States, each endowed like itself with sovereignty, each of them
maintaining by force its conception of right. The power of the State
over its own subjects is thus in the last resort a consequence of the
existence of other States. Upon the competition between them rests the
order of the world. It is a competition extending to every sphere of
life and in its acute form takes the shape of war, a struggle for
existence, for the mastery or for right.

IV.

ARBITRATION AND DISARMAMENT

To some people the place of war in the economy of nations appears to be
unsatisfactory. They think war wicked and a world where it exists out of
joint. Accordingly they devote themselves to suggestions for the
abolition of war and for the discovery of some substitute for it. Two
theories are common; the first, that arbitration can in every case be a
substitute for war, the second that the hopes of peace would be
increased by some general agreement for disarmament.

The idea of those who regard arbitration as a universal substitute for
war appears to be that the relations between States can be put upon a
basis resembling that of the relations between citizens in a settled and
civilised country like our own. In Great Britain we are accustomed to a
variety of means for settling disagreements between persons. There are
the law courts, there are the cases in which recourse is had, with the
sanction of the law courts, to the inquiry and decision of an
arbitrator, and in all our sports we are accustomed to the presence of
an umpire whose duty it is impartially to see that the rules of the
game are observed and immediately to decide all points that might
otherwise be doubtful.

The work of an umpire who sees that the rules of the game are observed
is based upon the consent of the players of both sides. Without that
consent there could be no game, and the consen