I am, of course, only illustrating the problem.[51] The principle which seems to me to emerge is the necessity for world-control where the decision is of world-concern. The inference from that principle is that the rights of the state are always subject to, and limited by, the necessarily superior rights of the international community. State-sovereignty, that is, in the sense in which the nineteenth century used that term, is obsolete and dangerous in a world like our world. It gives an authority to the nation-state which, in the light of the facts, is incompatible with the well-being of the world. It invokes the factor of prestige in realms where it has no legitimate application. It means that problems of which a wise solution is possible only in terms of reason have to find a solution amid circumstances of passion and power which obviate any possibility of justice. For in the external, as in the internal, sphere of the state, the choice is between the use of reason and conflict. The use of reason is the law of liberty; conflict means the erosion of liberty. If states are to conduct their operations always with the knowledge in the background that the price of disagreement is war, the consequences are obvious. The atmosphere of international affairs will be poisoned by fear, and fear will bring with it the system of armaments and alliances which, in 1914, issued naturally and logically in the Great War. That was the price properly paid for a scheme of things which assumed that the legal right of the state was unlimited, and harnessed to the support of that legality every primitive and barbarous passion by which nationalism can degrade humanity. We need not be afraid to assert that, in the international sphere, the sovereignty of the state simply means the right of any powerful nation to make its own conception of self-interest applicable to its weaker opponents. It is the old doctrine of self-help clothed in legal form; the doctrine against which law itself came as a protest in the name of order and common sense. And exactly as we cannot admit the right of a man to make his own law in the internal life of the community, so we cannot allow the single nation-state to make its own law in the wider life of the international community. Because that is what the sovereignty of the state ultimately means, the sovereignty of the state is a conception which outrages the patent needs of international well-being.