feeling, loyalty, and friendship, falling on a stranger race, murdering, burning, ravishing, torturing, and with no graver feelings than those of students on a lark.[1] Even today the groups we call nations or states have a double stardard: they forbid violence within and allow or even command it on occasion without—the very acts which are offenses, crimes in the one case, meeting with general approval or applause in the other. Inconsistent, we may say—but really so only to a confused perception. Moral conduct (in the historic sense of "moral") is the conduct becoming to members of a social whole and in furtherance of the ends of the social whole—but it is no wider than the social whole, and where there is no social whole, it has in the nature of the case no application. If some of us today condemn certain acts of nations or states as immoral, we do so in the name of a sentiment or idea to which no reality as yet corresponds; we imply a society, a social whole, which has no existence, but which, if it existed, would of necessity put this brand on the acts in question. It is surely inept to speak of the society of the human race at present; it is even inept to speak of Europe as a society—it is a collection of independent societies, of separate sovereign wholes.[2] j The only way in which separate wholes can be properly amenable to morality is to cease to be separate wholes, to merge themselves in one another or in some greater unity—then the law by which the larger whole lives becomes the law for each individual one. Independent societies already do this to a limited extent, namely so far as they make contracts or treaties with one another or have common understandings: to this extent they part with their individual sovereignty and become subject to moral rule. A society that breaks a treaty, that violates a common understanding, commits ipso facto an immoral act. But societies which have no treaties or understandings—independent, sovereign social groups—are in the nature of the case non-moral beings.[3]
Yes, individuals themselves, so far as they are agents of the group, acquire a more or less non-moral character. An
