Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals. The unity of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet distinct from the unity of those parts. Even in chemistry the laws which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the constituent atoms. And in that highest and most complex of all unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins, more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the unities which compose it. In the region in which States act and interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals. The orbit described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than the orbit of the separate life. The life which the individual surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the conditions. These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled; but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be, by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the other.