They're handed down from race to race,
And noiseless glide from place to place.
Reason they turn to nonsense; worse,
They make beneficence a curse!
Ah me! That you're a grandson you
As long as you're alive shall rue."
_Faust_ (translation by Sir T. Martin).

Thus, no absolute rights can be laid down even for men who share the
same ideas in their private and social intercourse. The conception of
the constitutional State in the strictest sense is an impossibility, and
would lead to an intolerable state of things. The hard and fast
principle must be modified by the progressive development of the fixed
law, as well as by the ever-necessary application of mercy and of
self-help allowed by the community. If sometimes between individuals the
duel alone meets the sense of justice, how much more impossible must a
universal international law be in the wide-reaching and complicated
relations between nations and States! Each nation evolves its own
conception of right, each has its particular ideals and aims, which
spring with a certain inevitableness from its character and historical
life. These various views bear in themselves their living justification,
and may well be diametrically opposed to those of other nations, and
none can say that one nation has a better right than the other. There
never have been, and never will be, universal rights of men. Here and
there particular relations can be brought under definite international
laws, but the bulk of national life is absolutely outside codification.
Even were some such attempt made, even if a comprehensive international
code were drawn up, no self-respecting nation would sacrifice its own
conception of right to it. By so doing it would renounce its highest
ideals; it would allow its own sense of justice to be violated by an