I deny, therefore, that there is any qualitative difference between the interests or the rights of states, and the interests or rights of other associations or individuals. Their purposes are ordinary, human purposes like any other: they are a means to the happiness of their members. They have, it seems to me, to be judged by exactly the same principles as those by which we judge the conduct of a trade union, or a church, or a scientific society. They do not constitute a corporate person living on a plane different from, and having standards other than, those of the individuals of whom they are composed. I fully agree that no decision ought to be taken about them, in the making of which they do not amply share. I fully agree, also, that limitations imposed upon their activities must pay scrupulous regard to the psychological facts out of which they are built. I do not, for instance, deny that the Partition of Poland was a crime against Poland, or that its inevitable result was to persuade millions of human beings that a war for their resuscitation was a morally justified adventure. But I see no difference between the Partition of Poland and, let us say, the suppression in the community of a Communist Party. Each seems to me an attack upon a corporate experience which is wrong because it does not persuade those who share that experience to abandon its implications. I do not advocate the supremacy of international authority over the national state in order to destroy the national state. I advocate that supremacy as the sole way with which I am acquainted to set the great fact of nationalism in its proper perspective. My point is, then, that the fact of a nation’s existence does not entitle it to the full panoply of a sovereign state. Scotland and Wales are both of them nations; neither possesses that panoply; neither, I think, suffers in moral or psychological stature by reason of its absence. Neither, let me add, do the Scandinavian peoples--perhaps the happiest of modern communities--who are only sovereign states upon the essential condition that they do not exercise their sovereignty. But there is no more humiliation in that position than in the position any government occupies in the context of its own subjects. Power is, by its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood. Those who exert it can only have their way by making its objects commend themselves, as, also, its methods of pursuing those objects, to those over whom it is exerted. The sovereign king in Parliament could legally disfranchise the working-classes in England; practically we know that it dare not do so. Everyone in England is aware of the grim, practical limitations under which parliamentary sovereignty operates; no one, I believe, finds humiliation in limits such as we know.