deductions.  Right disappears, or rather is translated in terms of might.  International morality equally disappears.  Individuals, it is true, seek to be governed by the consciousness of universal moral laws.  But a nation, as such, has no conscience, and is not bound to recognise the supremacy of anything higher than itself.  Morality, though it may bind the individual, does not bind the State, or, as General von Bernhardi has expressed it, “political morality differs from individual morality because there is no power above the State.”  In similar fashion the worship of wealth carries numerous consequences with it, which are well worthy of consideration.  But the main point, so far as it affects my present argument, is that it substitutes materialistic objects of endeavour for ethical and spiritual aims.  Once more morality is defeated.  The ideal is not the supremacy of good, but the supremacy of that range and sphere of material efficiency that is procurable by wealth.

PUBLIC RIGHT

Let us try to be more concrete still, and in this context let us turn to such definite statements as are available of the views entertained by our chief statesmen, politicians, and leaders of public opinion.  I turn to the speech which Mr. Asquith delivered on Friday evening, September 25, in Dublin, as part of the crusade which he and others are undertaking for the general enlightenment of the country.  “I should like,” said Mr. Asquith, “to ask your attention and that of my fellow-countrymen to the end which, in this war, we ought to keep in view.  Forty-four years ago, at the time of the war of 1870, Mr. Gladstone used these words.  He said:  ’The greatest triumph of our time will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics.’  Nearly fifty years have passed.  Little progress, it seems, has as yet been made towards that good and beneficent change, but it seems to me to be now at this moment as good a definition as we can have of our European policy—­the idea of public right.  What does it mean when translated into concrete terms?  It means, first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of states and of the future moulding of the European world.  It means next that room must be found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate consciousness of its own....  And it means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps, by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, of a real European partnership based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will."[6]

Much the same language has been used by Sir Edward Grey and by Mr. Winston Churchill.

[6] The Times, September 26.