UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

CHAPTER I.

I. ON THE LAWS OF NATURE REGULATING

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY.

PRACTICAL MEN shrink from having anything to do with whatever will not work.

Taught by experience, they have learned to recognise the existence of facts so firmly fixed in the constitution of things by nature, that for want of a clearer term we call them laws of nature. And all thinking men are agreed that nothing which clashes with these laws does or can work; while everything which does or will work must do so by using and obeying the laws of nature, by acting in concert with them, and in no wise against them.

This faith of practical men in the laws of nature, and utter distrust of everything which clashes, or is supposed to clash, with them, is not confined to the laws embraced in the physical sciences. only. With increasing knowledge the current of modern thought has set in with increasing force in favour of entire and implicit faith in all laws of nature, including those embraced in political science.

As surely as the engineer knows that, unless he construct his bridge in accordance with the laws

of mechanical science it will not stand, so surely does the merchant, in planning a trade transaction, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in framing a budget, know that the one or the other will succeed only so far as it is in strict accordance with the laws of political economy. Monopolies and protective duties, statutes of wages, and a hundred other things which were found to clash with these laws, have one after another been wisely swept like cobwebs to the domain of the moles and

away

bats.

Now, using the term 'laws of nature' in this sense strictly, and in no looser one, if it be really proved that such and such reforms are required to bring the present international system into harmony with the facts and laws of nature in points in which it now clashes with them, and consequently does not work, it will be seen at once that these reforms are required by something far more inexorable than the 'Lex Nature' of the Juriststhat, in fact, they are steps in the great march of civilisation which, the world and the human race being constituted as they are, must inevitably be taken, unless we prefer that human progress should halt on its career.

II. THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF NATIONS NOT OPTIONAL BUT BY LAW OF NATURE.

HAVING, in the previous section, clearly defined what we mean by laws of nature, the reader's attention is called to the fact that, as it is by law of nature, and not merely by human contrivance, that men are led to become socially connected and interdependent, so it is by law of nature, and not merely by human contrivance, that nations are led to maintain international intercourse and to become more or less dependent one on another.

Each country might have been endowed with a similar climate and soil. The air might have been made to fill only the valleys as the sea does now. In a thousand other ways each nation might have been made self-subsistent, and as effectually barred out from intercourse with every other as if each had been a separate world. But the world, as it is, with its arctic, temperate, and torrid zones, its varied soils and natural productions, its iron and coal beds lying in one zone, its cotton growing only in another-the world, as it is, with its nations of different habits and different races, separated by difference of language, but not cut off altogether the one from the other, because both capacity and inducement have been given, as they increase in knowledge and skill, more and more to bridge over the straits between them-the world,

as it is, is so framed as, instead of keeping nations isolated and separate, to compel them, as they advance in civilisation, more and more to weave the web of intercourse-to entangle, as it were, the threads of their national prosperity into an international skein. Experience has taught us that if a nation choose to act selfishly and, by corn laws or anything else, unduly to check internanational intercourse and interchange of wealth, it will thereby inevitably lessen its own selfish share of the comforts of life. And clearly it is not merely by human contrivance, or by any human law, but by law of nature that it is so.

III. ON THE LAWS BY WHICH THE DEGREE OF INTERNATIONAL DEPENDENCE IS DETERMINED.

But while all nations are by law of nature made more or less dependent upon international intercourse, obviously the degree in which they are dependent differs materially.

Nations may, in this respect, be regarded as roughly divisible into three groups or classes: 1st. Those thinly peopled, exporting natural produce, and importing manufactures and luxuries.

2nd. Those well peopled, consuming their own produce, and manufacturing their own

goods.

3rd. Those densely peopled, exporting manufactures and luxuries, and importing natural

produce.

And these three classes may be said to represent three stages in a nation's history.

Nations in their youth have almost always passed through the first or youthful stage; many have passed from it into the second, or self-subsistent stage; and a few pioneer nations have passed on through this middle stage into the third, or most dependent stage.

But it is not a matter of a nation's own choice altogether in which of these stages it shall permanently remain. This question also is determined, not merely by national will or the contrivance of governments, but by certain laws of nature; under these laws nations are indeed free to take what course they may choose, but they cannot rid themselves of them. They may act in opposition to what by those laws is their own true interest, but whether they do so through ignorance or folly, it will be at the cost of abridged prosperity and often of actual suffering.

It is not denied that nations may continue in the self-subsistent stage for long periods of history under certain peculiar circumstances. But it is submitted that a careful review of the facts of modern history may enable us to point out with something of certainty what those peculiar circumstances are under which alone nations can remain for long in