Morality being a relation between two or more contracting parties, he will notice that the history of mankind is marked by a consistent tendency to extend this relation, to include in the system of relationships more numerous and more distant objects, so that the moral agent is surrounded by a continually widening sphere of obligations. This system of relationship, which may be called the moral sphere, has grown up under a variety of influences, expediency, custom, religious emotion and political action; but the moral agents included in it at any given time are always bound to each other by a theoretical contract involving both rights and duties, and leading each to expect and to apply in all his dealings with the others a certain standard of conduct which is approximately fixed by the enlightened opinion of the majority for the benefit of the totality. The moral sphere then is a contractual unit of two or more persons who agree to moderate their individual conduct for their common good: and the State itself is only a stage in the growth of this moral unit from its emergence out of primitive savagery to its superannuation in ultimate anarchy, commonly called the Millennium. The State indeed is a moral sphere, a moral unit, which has long been outgrown by enlightened opinion; and the trouble is that we are now in a transition stage in which the boundaries of the State survive as a limitation instead of setting an ideal of moral conduct.[1] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: This conception of the gradually extending and still to be extended sphere of morality, or from another aspect of law, was implied, I think, by Lord Haldane in his Address on Higher Nationality. (_The Conduct of Life, and Other Addresses_, p. 99.) In this address Lord Haldane distinguished in the State three sanctions of conduct. 1. Law. 2. The Moral Sanction, Kant's Categorical Imperative "that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone." 3. The force of social habit or _sittlichkeit_, "less than legal and more than merely moral, and sufficient in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any question of resort to force." The Lord Chancellor adds, "If this is so within a nation, can it be so as between nations?" But although Lord Haldane distinguishes three sanctions of conduct, the resultant line of conduct is one. And it seems to me unimportant to analyse the sanctions if we can only estimate the sum of their obligations. It is this totality of obligations, the whole systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated analysis I call the moral sphere.