mode of life, and a scorn of death are no
longer necessary and sufficient guarantees of worth. Evidence of value
is both possible and required; before value is admitted it must be
shown. Self-defense in a legal and moral society are in the main
superfluous, and the values of individuals are so changed that to
justify them by the duel would seem out of place. Its service being to
defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it
falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to
depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly
illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to
have nothing but anti-social elements in it.

That nations exhibit the same type of relation toward one another that
we find in dueling and its code seems to be clear, although we must
always avoid pressing any analogy between individual and nation too
far. A claim to superiority that is deep and irrational, and which
appears on the surface as sensitiveness in regard to honor and
vanity, keeps nations always in defensive attitudes, quite apart from
the actual fear of aggression. This superficiality or at least
externality of relations is the source of actual conflict. The forms
employed to maintain these relations are obviously ornamental, are
elaborations of the forms of courtesy among individuals, are little
dramas of friendship, so to speak, little plays representing
friendliness, while the diplomatic motives are simply to obtain
everything possible, each nation for itself, without war, and to
maintain prestige. These relations are substitutes for social feelings
that do not exist. Generally speaking, nations are never friends. They
never really share in anything. They are all highly conscious of their
own prestige and dignity, and they always communicate with one another
in a formal way. In it all, we see the signs of emotions and habits
that extend far back to the beginnings of social life and indeed into
animal life. The display which takes the form of social relations
among nations, represented well by uniformed diplomats, is so plainly
archaic and its real meaning so obvious that we can hardly fail to
understand what it is all about. That the attitude is really
defensive, and the purpose to keep up appearances before strangers, so
to speak, can hardly be doubted.

The fact that these questions of national honor are in some respects
detached from the main realities of _pol