The Morality of Nations: A Study in the Evolution of Ethics

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K. Paul, Trench & Company, 1888 - 316 páginas
 

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Página 51 - For the wars are no massacres and confusions ; but they are the highest trials of right ; when princes and states, that acknowledge no superior upon earth, shall put themselves upon the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies by such success, as it shall please him to give on either side.
Página 68 - Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man.
Página 50 - England; yet the present branch of our inquiries will fall within a narrow compass, as offences against the law of nations can rarely be the object of the criminal law of any particular state. For offences against this law are principally incident to whole states or nations, in which case recourse can only be had to war ; which is an appeal to the God of hosts, to punish such infractions of public faith as are committed by one independent people against another : neither state having any superior...
Página 210 - To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.
Página 62 - ... the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the East which were ripe for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades of culture in the West — Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans — by means of its settlers; just as England, with equal right, has in Asia reduced to subjection a civilization of rival standing, but politically impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled, and still continues to mark...
Página 62 - Britain, are to be regarded in connection with the general history of the world. By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage — by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity — the Italian nation (the only one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political development and a superior...
Página 78 - Conquest is the premium given by nature to those national characters which their national customs have made most fit to win in war, and in many most material respects those winning characters are really the best characters. The characters which do win in war are the characters which we should wish to win in war.
Página 128 - Khan — that is, the chieftain of some hardy tribe that has been steeled by poverty and is tempted by plunder. Before such a conqueror the advanced civilization is apt to go down, so that in history we see civilization often conquered, sometimes holding its ground, but not often making great conquests, until in recent times the progress of invention strengthened it by giving it new weapons. The great conquering race of history has been one of the least progressive — the Turcomans.
Página 69 - Any given society has properties of its own which cannot be deduced from those properties of the individual which are common to men in all social states, for those properties may, as we have seen, remain constant when the social organization varies.
Página 67 - This difference between the case in which the joint effect of causes is the sum of their separate effects and the case in which it is heterogeneous to them — between laws which work together without alteration, and laws which, when called upon to work together, cease and give place to others — is one of the fundamental distinctions in nature.

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