Now nationality is a subjective conception that eludes definition in scientific terms. As an Englishman, I can feel in my bones the sense of what English nationality implies; I feel intimately, for instance, the things that enable me to claim Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens as typically English, without being able to put into words the things that make them so. Every factor to which nationality has been traced, race, language, common political allegiance, is an excessive simplicity which betrays scientific exactitude. It is true that nationality is born of a common historic tradition, of achievement and suffering mutually shared; it is true, also, that language and race, and even a common political allegiance, have played their part in its formation. It is obvious that there is something exclusive about nationality, that the members of any given nation have a sense of separateness from other people which gives them a feeling of difference, of uniqueness, which makes domination by others so unpleasant as to involve profound discomfort to a point which may involve, even justly involve, resistance to that domination. But the fact remains that nationality is a psychological phenomenon rather than a juridical principle. It is in the former, not the latter, sphere that we must seek to meet its claims. Mill’s principle, if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that every nation has a title to statehood. I want you to think what that implies. The modern state is a sovereign state, and in terms of that title no will can bind its purpose but its own. The legal meaning of sovereignty is omnicompetence. The state may, as it please, make peace or war. It can erect its own tariffs, restrict its immigration, decide upon the rights of aliens within its borders, without the duty of consulting its neighbours, or paying any attention to principles of justice. States have done all these things. There is no crime they have not been prepared to commit for the defence or the extension of their own power. A different moral code has been applied in history to their acts from what we insist upon applying to individual acts, and it is, quite definitely, a lower moral code. The history of the nation which becomes a state and insists upon the prerogatives of its statehood is a history incompatible with the terms upon which the maintenance of peace depends. That exclusive temper which, as I have argued, is the root of nationality means a measurable loss of ethical quality in those international relations which are concerned with questions of power. You have only to remember the acts which, during the war, states attempted against one another amid the applause of their subjects to realize that the recognition of national unity as a state means the destruction of private liberty and the violation of international justice, unless we can find means of setting some limit to the powers of which a nation-state can dispose.