consequent assertion of the rights and correspondent duties involved in that. It will await the institution of no tribunal, whose formal judgment will be a finality. In the nature of the nation in history, there can be no tribunal and no congress which shall be in itself supreme, and possess over the course of nations an ultimate and imperative control. As the nation is constituted as a moral person, it cannot abdicate its responsibility which is given in its being, and can, in its ultimate determination, be responsible to none on earth, but only and immediately to God. The nation will hold in its own determination, so long as it exists in the conditions of history, the issues of war, on which it enters in its entire being. It may act in certain circumstances through another, and it may refer the exposition of certain principles, or the estimate in the adjustment of certain concerns, to the judgment of another; but in this it may not act so as to impair its sovereignty, or to surrender its moral responsibility. In the realization of the being of the nation in history, there will be manifest among nations a deeper relationship. In their greater strength, and as their end is apprehended in the realization of the destination of humanity, there will come a more enduring peace. The advance of humanity is indeed slow; but in the solidarity of nations they will discern the sources and conditions of their aid to each other, and that all must suffer in the detriment of each. Then will come the sympathy and the helpfulness, which there is among men, who march toward the same goal, and at last must march all together if at all. It is therefore no dream, but the coming of a new life, which holds the prophecy and the realization of the fraternity of nations. In the development of history this relation is becoming more perfectly apprehended, and as mankind recognizes more deeply the universal fatherhood, there is manifested in the Christendom of nations the family of nations.1 1 Napoleon III. pronounced the award in the Universal Exposition," in the name of the family of nations." Thiers and Guizot have shown the course which would have represented the selfishness of France; but the idea of the fraternity of nations has always awakened in the spirit of modern France an emotion, and has stirred it with hopes beyond any appeal to selfish interests. The tendency of modern diplomacy is, to become more open, and the old devices and disguisements of merely sinister schemes and tortuous courses constantly avail less. But there is no estimate of the danger and disaster involved in the weakness and cowardice of nations, in not meeting as men. The premise of international rights is given in the postulate of Heffter, as cited by Wheaton: "Law in general, is the external freedom of the moral person. This law may be sanctioned or guaranteed, or may derive its force from self-preservation.". "The jus gentium is formed on reciprocity of will." The refusal of England to submit her action in recognizing the Confederates in rebellion as belligerents, to arbitration, proceeds upon the ground that it was an act of England in her sovereignty, and may in itself be referred to no arbitration; but it was a deliberate act, within her control, and the injuries to this nation which were resultant from it are therefore within her responsibility, and may be submitted to an arbitration. Their recognition as a belligerent power, by a nation, before the circumstance of war involved any necessity for it, tended necessarily to elevate them to an equality with the nation, and gave them all the advantages which arise from regulations shaped to apply to nations, in defining national rights in time of war. This was the constant security of the Alabama in British ports. The neutrality of England in the circumstance of war became nominal. Mr. Gladstone attributes many of the recent difficulties of England to her recognition of any power as a nation, when a transient interest may dictate. There was more than this in the eager manifestation of satisfaction at the peril approaching the American people. It would seem to have been a sudden disclosure of the spirit of the English toward the United States. If the disclosure was terrible, it would be weakness to forget it and peril to overlook it. Mr. Gladstone, who seems never to have heard the Hebrew national psalms said or sung, said, as a minister of state, that "Jefferson Davis had made the South a nation," and the remark is mainly significant as indicating among the statesmen of England the conception of what constitutes a nation. The sympathies of nations are more subtle and profound than are those of individuals, and the causes of the sympathy of Prussia and Russia and Italy for America, and the active sympathy of England for the rebellion, lie deep in the springs of history. The strength of the political course which Mr. Burlingame has inaugurated in the East, is that it does not regard these peoples merely as those with whom we are to open economic relations, a policy in the interests of the sovereignty and of the freedom of trade, nor to begin a scheme of conquest in which all the elements of national life in the people, however imperfect, are to be crushed; but it is the institution of a policy in which these elements, in the unity and spirit of the people, are developed, and is the investiture of them with powers and rights which have a moral content, and consist with international law. CHAPTER XIV. THE NATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL. THE tendency of the political speculation of the old world, in Greek and Roman thought, was to regard the state as above and before the individual, so that the existence of the latter was subordinate and secondary ;the individual existed only for the state, and the state alone existed as an end in itself. There was the assumption of a necessary contradiction, and the solution was in the negation of the individual. In Greece, the state acknowledged no moral, and allowed no formal limitation to its power. It took upon itself the immediate and exclusive conduct of life. It was to dispose of all, and not only to prescribe the avocations and regulate the affairs, but to direct even the thoughts and affections of men. It compelled the individual to engage in public pursuits and fill public offices and execute public trusts in the same manner as if subject to a military discipline. In contrast with this, the tendency of modern political speculation, in its abstract systems, has been to regard the individual as above and before the state, so that the existence of the latter is subordinate and secondary ; - the state exists for the individual, and the individual alone exists as an end in himself. In these conventional schemes, the state is apprehended as only the form which the individual adopts in the pursuance of his private ends; it is an artificial and temporary association, formed by a collection of certain individuals; it is established and maintained by a certain number of men, as private persons, and is subservient to their interests as individual or collective. It is secondary to the individual in the assumption that it is only an artificial and temporary organization, and in the rejection of the unity and continuity involved in its necessary conception, and manifested in its organic life. In the course of history, there has been through the Christian centuries, in the realization of the being of the nation and the individual, the evolution of no antagonism, but there has been the manifestation of their necessary foundation and unity. Firstly, The nation and the individual are existent in the conditions of history, each as a necessary and integral element, in the normal development of the other. The nation is no abstraction. It is not a formal and external order apart from the people. It is organic, and in its necessary process as a moral organism it presumes in the individual the realization of freedom. In this, it is constituted in its freedom. There is in this, instead of a source of variance, the postulate of its moral strength and its spirit. The individual, conversely, has his normal development in the nation; it is formed in the institution of a moral order. This has been the course of history. The transition from the unformed life of man, the barbarous condition, has been in the realization of the truly human, that is, the normal and the moral condition, and this has been formed in the relations of the nation. The isolation of man is the representation, not only of an unreal, but an undeveloped existence, and the institution of the normal relations of men, that is, the organization of society, is in the nation. There has been thus for the individual apart from the nation, no realized freedom. The nation has been the precedent of the realization of freedom. Secondly, The nation and the individual in their relation, exist each in a real and integral moral life and each as an end. The necessary conception of personality forbids that it should exist only as a means to an end, and its realization in the nation and in the individual forbids that either should be apprehended as merely secondary and subordinate. The nation, as a moral personality, has its law of being in itself, and its own vocation and its own end in history; the individual in his own personality has therein also his own law of being, and his own vocation and end.1 The personality of the individual has not its origin nor its foundation in the nation; the personality of the nation has not its origin nor its foundation in the individual, but each has its origin and foundation immediately in God, and its vocation is only from Him. There is therefore no necessary antagonism, but in the law of their being an inner unity. There can be, therefore, in their normal development no real conflict, and there can be no apparent or external conflict which does not involve in the one or the other the precedent contradiction of its own nature, and of the law of its own action, as determined in personality. The actual conflict of either with the other, is in its precedent a conflict with itself. That there should be the possibility of an apparent or an external conflict, lies in the fact that through the power of sin, and through the ignorance and the weakness of men, the course of each is agitated and disturbed, and the realization of its being must be through many crises; and in the fact also that the existence of each in itself is a development in the moral conditions of history and of life; but in the realization of the being of each, the possibility of this antagonism is diminished, elements of external opposition are eliminated, and all that separates or occasions variance is being constantly excluded in the course of the development itself. 1 There is the representation of the individual personality in the consciousness, in the dramatist: "I am a nobler substance than the stars: Or are they better because they are bigger? I have a will and faculties of choice, and power To do or not to do; and reason why I do or not do this; the stars have none. They know not why they shine more than this taper, |