What hope then can there be of a restoration of the comity of European nations, and the re-establishment of the Hague Conventions? I confess I can see none. The German Empire was conceived in duplicity and brought forth in war, and three times within living memory, as Sir Edward Grey has reminded us, she has wantonly provoked war in Europe in pursuance of her predatory designs. I can see no way out of the present travail except an armed peace, with the elimination as its basis for a long time to come of Germany from the councils of Europe. What hope of understanding can there be with a nation which does not observe the ordinary rules of diplomatic intercourse, that _jus fetiale_ which even the ancient world regarded as sacred? The world has seen with stupefaction--there has, I think, been no such case for hundreds of years--the Ambassador of the Austrian Government taking advantage of his immunities and sovereign character to suborn seditious conspiracy in the State to which he was accredited?[74] It is difficult to believe that this case now stands alone. Conventions with such a Power are both a delusion and a snare. They delude us with an appearance of agreement where none exists. In unscrupulous hands, the more precise and technical they are, the more do they lend themselves to casuistry, adding, as some one has said, the terrors of law to the horrors of war. I am afraid that such conventions are now hopelessly discredited. I doubt if we shall hear very much in future of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or of the sanctity of the _levée en masse_ as a medium of lawful transition from the one to the other; he who studies the German White Book on hostilities in Belgium will see how easily a belligerent, if he be so minded, can dispose with a quibble of the obligations to respect an improvised force which has “no time” to organise. A belligerent contemplating a sudden attack and a belligerent having to meet it will entertain very different conceptions as to what is meant by “no time.” War has, indeed, come to be, as von der Goltz prophesied it would be, a war not between armies but between peoples, and we are further than ever from the oft-quoted maxim of Rousseau that “War is not a relation of Man to Man but of States to States,” in which particular individuals are enemies only by the accident of a uniform. That was the voice of Individualism; but States grow more and more collectivist, and never so collectivist as in war. If, as an eminent writer has remarked, “out of the inner life of a nation comes its foreign policy,” so, we may add, out of its municipal law, its military usages, and its economic necessities will come its construction of international law. The Effect on International Law.