And the mercy that we gave them
Was to sink them in the sea,
Down on the coast of High Barbarie.

No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the
establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic
Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common
defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective
responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under
existing circumstances of politics and international trade. Nor would
such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by
modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from
international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of
ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something
of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and
helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe,
throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the
early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the
English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French. The
Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same
characterisation.

The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal,
Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure. Its ideal,
when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its
goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised
by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State. The
gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this
animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the
direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of
ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached a
conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual
working arrangement. Its practical consequences have been of the nature
of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and
dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any
institutional furniture suitable to its own ends. It has in effect gone
no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within
the nineteenth century.

In point of time, the decay of