Until nations have come to be parts of communities, or group-States, there will be no really effective analogy between individual morality and State morality. There is, of course, a growing international decency, a reaching out toward co-operation, a recognition that certain things are “not done”; but it is liable to be violated, as we have seen, at any moment by any State which is, or thinks itself, strong enough to override laws which have no adequate latent force behind them. To create this latent controlling force we have paramount need of a system of group-States, leading on by slow degrees, through the linking of one group with another, to a United States of the world. The necessary line of progression is sufficiently disclosed by the violation of Belgian neutrality and other matters in this war. Public opinion not backed by latent force has been proved useless. There is no such thing, I fear, as public opinion worth the name except within a definite community. The task of statesmen when peace comes is the formation of a United States of Europe—linked if possible with the countries of America—the creation of a real public opinion backed by a real, if latent, force. § 8. Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight and—your tongue in your cheek. By quaint irony his central idea, “the ego-rampant,” was temperamentally suited to those Prussians whom he hated. The Neo-German conception of the State, (if one may fairly judge it out of the mouths of certain Germans) as a law unto itself, demanding all from the individuals who compose it, and taking all it can get from the world at large, may be inverted Nietzscheism, but it is the creature of Prussian history, and of very different men. It is based on what we others, and I should imagine many Germans, think is a transient and false notion of what States should be. We say they should not roam the earth considering only their own strength. True that, in the absence as yet of the system of group-States, States still can seize here or seize there, if they be strong enough, but we emphatically deny that they should do so _on principle_, as the new German philosophy seems to teach, and set the robber’s ideal, the robber’s fashion of morality, for the individuals who compose those States. The philosophy, not only of the rest of Europe, but of Germany, before all, in the days of Kant and Hegel, presumed that the hard-won morality of individuals amongst themselves would ultimately become the morality of States. “The fact that the sense of community among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a Citizenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten Code of States and Peoples.” (Kant.)