These are the hard facts to which any one who attempts to take stock of the present situation and immediate prospects of International Law must address himself. International Law rests on a reciprocity of obligation; if one belligerent fails to observe it the other is, as a mere matter of self-preservation, released from its observance towards him, and is bound not by law but by morality, by his own conception of what he owes to his own self-respect. It is well that our own conception has been rather in advance of International Law than behind it, and long may it so remain. But in proportion as our conception is high and the German conception is low, it seems to me incumbent on us to place our hopes for the future in the strength of our right arm and in that alone. And if, in Burke’s noble phrase, we are to consider ourselves for the future “embodied with Europe” so that, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, we feel that nothing human is alien to us, then we must be prepared to support our treaty guarantees of the independence of the small nations with an adequate armed force; otherwise they will regard our friendship as an equivocal and compromising thing. If we are to offer them the protection of Europe in place of the suzerainty of Germany, we must be in a position to honour our promissory notes or they will indeed be but a scrap of paper--a cruel and otiose encouragement to the weak to defy the strong. The German as Outlaw. As for Germany, I can see little hope except in a sentence of outlawry. Mere black-listing of the names of responsible German commanders, although worth doing (and I have reason to believe that at the French War Office it is being done) with a view to retribution, is not going to change the German character. We shall have to revise our notions of both municipal and international law as regards her. The tendency of English law has long been, as an acute jurist has pointed out,[75] to lay more emphasis on domicile than on nationality, the disabilities of the alien have been diminished almost to vanishing-point, and British citizenship itself could be had almost for the asking. Not of it need the alien knocking at our hospitable doors say, in the words of the chief captain, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” It has been made disastrously cheap. All that is likely to be changed. It is not a little significant that already the courts have begun to take judicial notice of the peculiar morality of the German and have expressly made it the basis of a decision extending the conception of what constitutes a prisoner of war.[76] And alone among the emergency legislation the drastic Aliens Act is not limited in its preamble, as are the other Acts, to the duration of the war. These things are portents. It is impossible to believe that a revolution more catastrophic than anything through which Europe has passed, a revolution beside which the French Revolution assumes the proportions