VIII THE EQUALITY OF NATIONS BEFORE THE LAW AND SOME OF ITS IMMEDIATE PREREQUISITES SAY AY about victory and annexations and indemnities and contributions all that can be said, and you are no nearer a definition of the organization of lasting peace than if you had never opened your mouth. These matters belong to the tradition of secret diplomacy and exclusive sovereignties. In dealing with peace in terms of them you have, if the foregoing analyses mean anything at all, only scotched the snake of war, not killed it. The fact is that there exists a stock of commonplaces so obvious, so inevitable to the very simplest act of coöperation between men, that we are not aware of them until they are undermined or hurt. Then we regard them as miraculous novelties and make a great to-do about their application. They are like the air we breathe a thing we are not conscious of until our breathing gets troubled — whereupon we cast about for patent medicines when all we need to do is open the window. Organizing lasting peace is only opening the international window. Organizing lasting peace is only making deeper, wider and more thoroughgoing application of the irreduceable principles which are the trite and living foundations of any and all community life. They have been known and repeated since the days of Isaiah and of Plato. They are basic assumptions of this book; only the language that expresses them has altered, not they. In toto, they come to some such thing as this: Men live in families, herds or groups of varying inheritance, character and organization. To survive and to grow, they stand in need of food, clothing, shelter and freedom for the free play of their spontaneous energies. These they obtain by mastering the non-human natural environment in which they live, by tilling and mining the soil, harnessing the winds and the waters, domesticating and hunting the animals, learning to know and to control the |