I conclude, therefore, that if the nation is entitled to self-government, it is to a self-government limited and defined by the demands of a wider interest. I conclude that its recognition as a state, if sovereignty be involved in that recognition, is incompatible with a just system of international relations. It is, further, incompatible with the notion of an international law regarded as binding upon the member-states of the international community. I need not dwell upon the impossible difficulties in which the defenders of this doctrine have found themselves.[52] In their extreme form they have even led a great jurist to write of war as the supreme expression of the national will.[53] I am unable to share such a view. Where war begins, freedom ends. Where war begins, the opportunity of making just solutions of any problem in dispute is indefinitely postponed. And I ask you to remember that, although, under modern conditions, a whole nation is implicated in war after its beginning, that is not the case either with its preparation or its declaration. That is an affair of the agents of the state whose interest in the action they take may be totally at variance with the interest of the people for whom they are taken as acting. They may be serving private ambition, a particular party; they may be acting on false information or wrong conceptions. My point is that they dispose of the whole power of the state, and that there is no means of checking their activity save the very unlikely means of revolution. The full implications of national sovereignty are a license to wreck civilization. I cannot recognize those implications as necessary to a proper view of national freedom.