[p. 540]
|540| if the peace treaties stipulated unconditional mutual peace; and if the expression of an eternal peace and eternal friendship between the powers does have this expression, it is to be understood with the limitation lying in the nature of the matter: before it is attacked or hostilely acted against by one side. No state can bind itself to let itself be treated hostilely or attacked and yet not to defend itself, yet to keep the peace.
The kinds of hostilities, however, have so infinite a possibility that they are wholly indeterminable by human understanding, and the more determinations, that is, the more rights are established, the more easily a contradiction of such rights arises. If one side pursues a right conceded to it as far as it is conceded to it, it will collide with some other right that belongs to the other side. Look at the mutual manifestos and state papers which, on the occasion of a quarrel of two states, contain the accusation of the conduct of the other power and the justification of one’s own!
Each side grounds its own on rights and accuses the other of the violation of a right. The right of the one state A has been violated by state B in a right a that belongs to it, but state B demonstrates that it has maintained its right b and that this cannot be taken for any violation of the right of A. The public takes sides, each party asserts that it has the right on its side, and both parties are right, and it is precisely the rights themselves that come into contradiction with one another.
It is the philanthropists and moralists who decry politics as an endeavour and an art of seeking one’s own advantage at the expense of right, as a system and work of injustice, and the politically gossiping impartial public, that is, a multitude without interest and without fatherland, whose ideal of virtue is the quiet of the
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