§ 7
The City State
The City State, self-contained, self-supporting, truly democratic, is marked by a similar pugnacity. Only full citizenship conferred full moral rights, and any ferocity could be justified in war against another city. Athens wore herself out in the long struggle with Sparta, and Greece was lured to destruction by the devil of Imperialism, whose stock argument is to suggest that a State can extend its rights without extending its obligations. But the limitation of the moral sphere by the boundaries of the city is less apparent in the Greek States, because in the historical period at least they were already in transition to a larger view, and enlightened opinion certainly believed in a moral system which should include all Greek States, to the exclusion of course of all "barbarians": but this larger view was even more definitely limited, and the demarcation of those within from those outside the moral sphere was never more sharply conceived, than in the difference commonly held to exist between Greeks and Barbarians. Yet even so Greece can maintain her pre-eminence in thought; for Plato and Euripides at least glimpsed the conception, by which we do not yet consent to be guided, of the moral equality of all mankind.[3]
For all these reasons the City State as a limited moral sphere is better seen perhaps in Mediæval Italy, where, I imagine, a Florentine might kill a native of Pisa whenever he liked; whereas if he killed a fellow Florentine he risked at least the necessity of putting himself outside the moral sphere, of having that is to leave Florence and stay in Pisa till the incident was forgotten.[4]
§ 8
The Nations of Europe ferae naturae
In the next and latest stage in the expansion of the moral system we find it again conterminous with the frontiers of the State. But it is now no longer the small city state of Ancient Greece and Mediæval Italy, but the large political unit, roughly and hypothetically national,[5] which constitutes the modern State, whether Kingdom, Republic, or Empire. I have called this the latest stage in the extension of the sphere of morality because it is the one which actually prevails and limits our national conduct. For the paradox of legal murder and massacre in the modern world is resolved as soon as we realise that war is a conflict between two or more isolated moral systems, each of which only regards violence as a crime to be suppressed within the limits of its own validity. International warfare in its crudest form is only a manifestation of the original wolfish state of man, the "state of nature" which exists between two moral agents who have no moral obligation to each other (but only to themselves). The fact that the primitive savage was an individual moral agent having no moral obligation to anyone but himself, while the modern fighting nation is a moral agent of who knows how many millions, does not alter the essential character of the conflict.