ABSTRACT
If the case for interfering with primitive peoples for their own good is a doubtful one, the case for crusading among civilized ones is even more so. Men can learn something from the experience of other nations, if they can absorb it into their own experience; but for outsiders to impose solutions to other people's problems, in the name of 'liberty' or Social justice', is to meddle with matters they can neither understand nor control. Again, when a state decides to interfere in the internal affairs of another, it has no way of consulting the people themselves, on whose behalf it claims to act. For intervention of this sort rarely happens except when a nation is split. At such a time, 'the people's will' has no meaning, and there is no way of telling what the general response will be to intervention on either side. To say, for instance, that British intervention in Jordan in 1958 saved the state from subversion by the United Arab Republic, is to ignore the fact that many of its inhabitants would have preferred the success of the subversion, and believed that their highest interests would have been served by Union with the Republic. Intervention of this sort can never be impartial as between a government and its dissident subjects. And once a clear answer can be given to what a people wants, it is already well on the way to settling its own problems for itself.
