A quarter of a century later, in the beginning of the French Revolution, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, advocated the union of states in behalf of common peace, but he rested his argument on morality, not on force. There was to be a league of states, with a legislature and courts of justice, but the decisions were to be executed by the states themselves. He held that after the court gave a decision in a specified case and published the evidence and arguments, public opinion would be strong enough to enforce the judgment. By discarding force Bentham had the advantage of preserving the sovereignty of the states, a thing that is particularly esteemed by an Englishman. He is to be considered the first of a series of eminent peace advocates who look no further than a league of states bound together by their plighted word and relying on the weight of public opinion to coërce the individual states. He had given his life to the task of fixing the sway of law in the minds of humanity, and it was a part of his general idea that a high court of justice, investigating a controversy, and exposing all the sides of it before a world of fair minded observers, would lessen the asperity of opposing passions so that the verdict of the court would be received as saving credit and honor to the party who had to yield. It is out of this attitude that our whole doctrine of arbitration as an expedient for escaping war has its rise, a doctrine of such importance in our general subject that no peace advocate would dare reject it wholly. Bentham’s opinion was expressed in a stray pamphlet that made little impression in his time and has nearly escaped the notice of posterity. A more conspicuous achievement, and nearly contemporary, was an essay by Immanuel Kant, philosopher at Königsberg, in Prussia. In 1795 he published _Zum ewigen Frieden_, an outline for a league of perpetual peace. There was a time, he argued, when men lived by force under the laws of nature, each regulating his own conduct toward his neighbors, the strongest man having his way through his ability to overawe his associates. Then came the state and the rule of law, and with their arrival one saw the exit of personal combat. Kant applied the same argument to the intercourse of the nations, saying they were in a state of nature toward one another. He proposed to organize a super-state over them, with authority to bring them under a law prohibiting wars among themselves. He would assign a definite field of action to the new power, with the function of making laws in enforcing that authority, and it would have the necessary administrative and judicial officers. The law made by the united government was to be as good law for its own purposes as the law made by the individual states for their purposes.