Excerpt: ...purely physical: their position as members of one society has given them a moral relation, questions affecting which can only be settled by reference to the judgment of the society as a whole. Within the limits of the State this fact is already clearly recognised by the common voice of public opinion. If Smith quarrels with his neighbour Robinson, because Smith's old English sheep-dog is suspected of having scratched up Pg 119 Robinson's lawn, and Smith says the poor dog would never do such a thing, and anyhow ...
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Excerpt: ...purely physical: their position as members of one society has given them a moral relation, questions affecting which can only be settled by reference to the judgment of the society as a whole. Within the limits of the State this fact is already clearly recognised by the common voice of public opinion. If Smith quarrels with his neighbour Robinson, because Smith's old English sheep-dog is suspected of having scratched up Pg 119 Robinson's lawn, and Smith says the poor dog would never do such a thing, and anyhow Robinson had no business to leave his back gate open, while Robinson declares that that brute is becoming a damned nuisance, and so provokes Smith to express a hope that now perhaps that grass of Robinson's won't want so much godless mowing on Sunday morning: if two neighbours, in short, have a difference of opinion they both know perfectly well that the rights of the argument can never be decided by a free fight in the middle of the road, even if one of them happens to be a heavy-weight champion. Moreover, if they do come to blows it is perfectly certain that the opinion of the whole road will be against them, and that the Law, to which they might have appealed in the first instance, will intervene as the embodiment of that opinion. The street fight is clearly recognised as not only futile but immoral; it not only settles no questions of principle but it constitutes a breach of the moral relation between two members of one community; it is become merely a rather sordid exhibition of irrelevant physical facts. The average citizen of England or Germany would never think of encouraging a fight between two sides of a street: why does he not recognise with equal directness the futility and immorality of a fight between two Pg 120 sides of a continent? 87 It is only because public opinion has not yet effectively realised that the moral sphere includes not only the citizens of one city and the cities of one nation, but the nations of a continent...
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