the State was never urged as a conclusive argument.  It was the legal right and not the natural right which was emphasized as justifying those who took up arms in order to disrupt the Union.  But if an American citizen denies that the principle of “self-determination” can be rightfully applied to the affairs of his own country, how can he consistently maintain that it is a right inseparable from a true conception of political liberty and therefore universally applicable, just in principle, and wise from the practical point of view?

Of course, those who subscribe to “self-determination” and advocate it as a great truth fundamental to every political society organized to protect and promote civil liberty, do not claim it for races, peoples, or communities whose state of barbarism or ignorance deprive them of the capacity to choose intelligently their political affiliations.  As to peoples or communities, however, who do possess the intelligence to make a rational choice of political allegiance, no exception is made, so far as words go, to the undeviating application of the principle.  It is the affirmation of an unqualified right.  It is one of those declarations of principle which sounds true, which in the abstract may be true, and which appeals strongly to man’s innate sense of moral right and to his conception of natural justice, but which, when the attempt is made to apply it in every case, becomes a source of political instability and domestic disorder and not infrequently a cause of rebellion.

In the settlement of territorial rights and of the sovereignty to be exercised over particular regions there are several factors which require consideration.  International boundaries may be drawn along ethnic, economic, geographic, historic, or strategic lines.  One or all of these elements may influence the decision, but whatever argument may be urged in favor of any one of these factors, the chief object in the determination of the sovereignty to be exercised within a certain territory is national safety.  National safety is as dominant in the life of a nation as self-preservation is in the life of an individual.  It is even more so, as nations do not respond to the impulse of self-sacrifice.  With national safety as the primary object to be attained in territorial settlements, the factors of the problem assume generally, though not always, the following order of importance:  the strategic, to which is closely allied the geographic and historic; the economic, affecting the commercial and industrial life of a nation; and lastly the ethnic, including in the terms such conditions as consanguinity, common language, and similar social and religious institutions.