[Footnote 8: Such a volume or something very much like it has actually made its appearance, since these lines were written, in Professor Robert Michels' _Political Parties_ (Jarrold, 1916).]
[Footnote 9: Cf. Bernard Shaw, in Pease, _History of the Fabian Society_, p. 268: "Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy itself will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than 'stoking up' election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible."]
The real importance of diplomacy, as I have said, is in the fact that it is a mitigation of primary ferocity, a symptom of readiness to negotiate, a recognition of the fact that disputes need not be settled by immediate violence: and as such it points to a time when war may be superseded, as personal combat has been superseded by litigation. The man who puts a quarrel with his neighbour into the hands of a legal representative is a stage higher in social civilisation than the man who fights it out at sight. Diplomats are the legal representatives of nations--only there is no supernational court before which they can state their case.
Of course, it is perfectly true that the ultimate sanction of diplomacy is always force, that international negotiations may always be resolved into a series of polite threats, and that the envoy of the small and weak nation rarely has any influence. Indeed there are few less enviable situations than that of the minister of a very small State at the court of a very large one. But the mere fact that force is their sanction does not _ipso facto_ dispose of diplomatic and arbitrational methods. We all know that the force at the disposal of the Sovereign is the ultimate sanction of Law. But that force never has to be fully exerted because there is a common consent to respect the Law and its officers.
[Footnote 10: Cf. Webb, _Industrial Democracy_, p. 718.]
The real difference between legal methods and the methods of diplomacy (in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible between them. For all their ambassadors and diplomatic conferences the nations of Europe are only wolves with good manners. And manners, as we all know, are no substitute for morals.