f the moment. It is implicit
in the natural development of the process of civilization. At one stage,
no doubt, warfare plays an important part in constituting states and so,
indirectly, in promoting 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.[221] 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.[222]

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.[223] 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 them
in awe. We have attained a condition in which a state is able