records the progress of a community of rights, interests, and obligations among nations, and the expansion of the Family of Nations. History, in the proportions in which she is presented when she tells of the relations of States, has had more to say of disappointment and failures than of fulfilment and success, although it may be that the historian has given too little attention to the question propounded by Bishop Berkeley in the Querist, whether nations as well as individuals may not sometimes go mad.
All who are in the line of true succession from the founders of International Law have built upon this assumption of a Society of Nations. The assumption has been necessary to them for their definitions and their standards, their whole sense of values. 'The family of nations', we read in a well-known text-book,[1] 'is an aggregate of States which, as the result of their historical antecedents, have inherited a common civilisation, and are at a similar level of moral and political opinion.'[2] Outside of the Family no State can be regarded as a 'normal international person'.
If the assumption of a genuine Society of Nations were wholly valid, there would be little need to supplement it by instituting a formal League, which in time, if not in its origin, might be too mechanically governmental. Yet this assumption, almost complete in its range and character, has given to International Lawyers the ground for their hopes. 'It is a bright feature of modern civilisation, wrote one of the most distinguished of them in recent years, 'that the Governments of Europe allow in their intercourse with one another considerable weight to a rule of Right as controlling the dictates of ambition or of interest, and that their respect for such Right commends
- ↑ T. E. Holland, The Elements of Jurisprudence, first ed., 1880.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 347 of the 7th ed., 1895. The book has a concise and helpful chapter (xviil) on International Law.
