Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM It has been observed at an earlier stage in this inquiry that freedom is a term which is not properly applicable to the human race as a whole, but only to individuals as communities of impulses, and to nations as communities of individuals. But, though that appeared to be a good reason for postponing the consideration of universal ends, or universal laws of morality, the treatment of the subject as a whole would be incomplete and unsatisfactory if all reference to a possible extension of freedom, beyond the fields in which it has already been realized, were omitted. A few lines must be added about the meaning and the practical requirements of universal freedom. If the idea of freedom is to be raised to a higher level, it must be extended to the relations between nation and nation; nations being, at the present stage of evolution, the only units which intervene between individual men and humanity as a whole. From national or political freedom, the next step should be to international freedom. In order torealize the idea of international freedom it would be necessary, first, that nations should be united in the prosecution of an end which is common to all of them; secondly, that they should be ready to make national sacrifices towards the attainment of that end; and, finally, that they should acknowledge the presidency of a sovereign authority, which should determine the amount and nature of the sacrifice, and be in a position to enforce its own orders. The only final end which is common to the whole of humanity, when regarded as a collective unit, is advance to a higher level of civilization; and this end can only be attained by an observance of the laws of morality. It would seem to follow, as a logical consequence, that if all men could be induced t...