[Footnote 4: Duelling might be classified theoretically as a survival of the wolfish condition sketched in Sec. 5. But the persistent institution of single combat should not be regarded as in itself a survival, but rather as an outlet for the surviving instinct, a concession justified by political or social considerations that vary from age to age. Even Plato in his _Republic_ (465 A) agreed that the citizen might in certain circumstances take the law into his own hands, probably regarding such action as a sort of equity, what Aristotle calls [Greek: epanorthoma nomou elleipei dia ton katholou], a rectification of certain special cases not covered by law. In modern states again, e.g. in Austria and Germany, duelling is not so much a survival as a corollary of militarism, which involves a fetichistic veneration of the military uniform or of military "honour."] Sec. 8 The Nations of Europe _ferae naturae_ In the next and latest stage in the expansion of the moral system we find it again conterminous with the frontiers of the State. But it is now no longer the small city state of Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Italy, but the large political unit, roughly and hypothetically national,[5] which constitutes the modern State, whether Kingdom, Republic, or Empire. I have called this the latest stage in the extension of the sphere of morality because it is the one which actually prevails and limits our national conduct. For the paradox of legal murder and massacre in the modern world is resolved as soon as we realise that war is a conflict between two or more isolated moral systems, each of which only regards violence as a crime to be suppressed within the limits of its own validity. International warfare in its crudest form is only a manifestation of the original wolfish state of man, the "state of nature" which exists between two moral agents who have no moral obligation to each other (but only to themselves). The fact that the primitive savage was an individual moral agent having no moral obligation to anyone but himself, while the modern fighting nation is a moral agent of who knows how many millions, does not alter the essential character of the conflict. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: See below, Chapter IV, Sec. 4. _Nationalism True and False_.] Sec. 9 The Convenience of Diplomacy