(3) The third moral is that the principle of nationality is of such force that it is fruitless to try to stop its victory. Wherever a community of many millions of individuals, who are bound together by the same blood, language, and interests, become so powerful that they think it necessary to have a State of their own, in which they can live according to their own ideals and can build up a national civilisation, they will certainly get that State sooner or later. What international politics can, and should, do is to enforce the rule that minorities of individuals of another race shall not be outside the law, but shall be treated on equal terms with the majority. States embracing a population of several nationalities can exist and will always exist, as many examples show.
(4) The fourth moral is that every progress in the development of International Law wants due time to ripen. Although one must hope that the time will come when war will entirely disappear, there is no possibility of seeing this hope realised in our time. The first necessities of an eternal peace are that the surface of the earth should be shared between States of the same standard of civilisation, and that the moral ideas of the governing classes in all the States of the world should undergo such an alteration and progressive development as would create the conviction that arbitral awards and decisions of courts of justice are alone adequate means for the settlement of international differences. Eternal peace is an ideal, and in the very term "ideal" is involved the conviction of the impossibility of its realisation in the present, although it is a duty to aim constantly at such realisation. The Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague, now established by the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, is an institution that can bring us nearer to such realisation than ever could have been hoped. And codification of parts of the Law of Nations, following the codification of the rules regarding land warfare and the codification comprised in the Declaration of London, will in due time arrive, and will make the legal basis of international intercourse firmer, broader, and more manifest than before.[69]
[Footnote 69: See Oppenheim, "Die Zukunft des Völkerrechts" (1911) where some progressive steps are discussed which the future may realise.]