The clay vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,--very much as the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the Powers.
And the mercy that we gave them Was to sink them in the sea, Down on the coast of High Barbarie.
No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under existing circumstances of politics and international trade.

Nor would such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe, throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French.

The Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same characterisation.
The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal, Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure.

Its ideal, when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State.

The gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached a conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual working arrangement.