The likelihood of any of these difficulties becoming real is, surely, exceedingly small. An international authority must presumably be endowed with an average volume of human common sense; and it is no more likely than any other authority to invite disaster. Indeed it is rather likely to fail to embark upon experiments and decisions it ought to make from an excessively delicate sense of what some particular nation may feel. International life in this realm is much more likely to be a régime of example and influence than one of legislative compulsion simply because the penalties of national dissent would strain too gravely the structure of the authority which sought an unwise imposition of its will. Here, once more, the situation is very like that of the internal life of a national state. There is hardly any association the state could not overthrow if it bent its energies to the task. But, also, most states are wise enough to realize that victories of this kind are empty victories, that solutions imposed by force have consequences invariably too grave to be satisfactory in their application. Consent has its full place in the international sphere; and it is a safeguard of national right as creative here, as elsewhere. Indeed it may reasonably be argued that with the disappearance of national sovereignty, the factor of consent is likely to be far more effective, far more genuinely related to the realities of the world; than it is at the present time. For consent between two powers like, say, America and Nicaragua, or Great Britain and Iraq has something in it which partakes of the ironical spirit. It is consent always in the knowledge that refusal to agree will make no serious difference to the result that occurs. But the surrender of national sovereignty is the surrender of aggressive power; and the nation can move on its way the more freely since it knows that it no longer lives in the shadow of international injustice. CHAPTER IV THE OUTLOOK FOR LIBERTY Every study of freedom is a plea for toleration; and every plea for toleration is a vindication of the rights of reason. The chief danger which always confronts a society is the desire of those who possess power to prohibit ideas and conduct which may disturb them in their possession. They are rarely concerned with the possible virtues of novelty and experiment. They are interested in the preservation of a static society because in such an order their desires are more likely to be fulfilled. Their ideas of right and wrong lie at the service of those desires. The standards they formulate are nothing so much as methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new order in which different demands would secure fulfilment.