You may, if you please, pursue the same principle into international relations and the political philosophy of Machiavelli. Among nations bad faith and other conduct regarded as immoral for individuals has flourished because international public opinion has been faint and without hands. This is more true of some epochs than others, and was particularly the case among the small, despotic and transitory states of Italy in the time of the Renaissance. Machiavelli, I suppose, desiring above all things the rise of a Prince who, by gaining supreme power, should unite and pacify the country, laid down for his guidance such rules of success—immoral if applied to personal relations—as he believed were likely to work in the midst of the moral anarchy which prevailed. There is, however, no sound reason for erecting this opportunism into a general principle and holding that international relations are outside the moral sphere. They come within that sphere so fast as single nations develop continuity and depth of life, and nations as a group become more intimate. Then moral sentiment becomes a force which no nation can safely disregard. In many cases of what we judge to be bad conduct the man belongs to a group whose standards are not the same as those of our own group by which we judge him. If his own group is with him his conscience and self-respect will not suffer, nor will he, so far as this group is concerned, undergo any blame or moral isolation. Practically all historical judgments are subject to this principle. I may believe that slaveholding was wrong; but it would be very naïve of me to suppose that slaveholders suffered from a bad conscience, or found this practice any bar to their success. On the contrary, as it is conventional morality that makes for conventional success, it would be the abolitionist who would suffer in a slaveholding society. It is simply a question of the _mores_, which, as Sumner so clearly showed, may make anything right or anything wrong, so far as a particular group is concerned. The conflict of group standards within a larger society is also a common example. The political grafter, the unscrupulous man of business, the burglar, or the bad boy, seldom stands alone in his delinquency, but is usually associated with a group whose degenerate standards more or less uphold him, and in which he may be so completely immersed as not to feel the more general standards at all. If so, we cannot expect his conscience will trouble or his group restrain him. That must be done by the larger society, inflicting blame or punishment, and especially, if possible, breaking up the degenerate group. In many, perhaps most, of such cases the mind of the individual is divided; he is conscious of the degenerate standards and also of those of the larger group; they contend for his allegiance.