Chapter VI: Part 6

In all these powers then which bear or have borne the Imperial style, Russia, Germany, Austria, France under the first Buonaparte, we can see a distinct connexion with the Roman power. The thought of the Roman power in some of its forms and stages was present to the minds of those by whom the Imperial style was taken. But the application of that style to so many powers has gone far to take from it any distinct meaning. I will not say that the words “Empire” and “Imperial” were always in my younger days used with a conscious reference to Rome and her memories; but I will say that they were not used quite as they are now, simply to sound fine. A poet or an orator might use them in some impassioned strain; men did not in every day speech talk about “the Empire” as familiarly as they talk about “the parish.” A little time back, in opposition to this new insular whim, “Empire” always meant something specially French. Even the cant phrase of “the Second Empire” to mean the dominion of the last Buonaparte has, I suspect, done something to overshadow the great truths of history; we all know that a man who has written many volumes on a great historical subject took for granted that a “Prince of the Empire,” above all a Prince of Orange, must mean something in France. To those whose studies lead them to look on _Imperator_ and βασιλεύς as words which translate each other, it does seem a pity if the style of Emperor should come simply to be the English equivalent for τύραννος.

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But leaving smaller questions like these aside, there is indeed one survival of the ancient Empire before whose mighty history all minds must bend in awe, a survival well nigh greater and more memorable than that of which it is the survival. When Gratian, the Christian _Imperator_, laid aside the badges of the pagan _Pontifex Maximus_, truly he did not foresee the day when a Christian _Pontifex Maximus_ should claim to place the crown of the _Imperator_ on his brow, and should even claim the right to take away what he might in some sort seem to have given. Christian Cæsars might indeed repeat what a pagan Cæsar had said in unconscious prophecy, that he could better bear the proclamation of a rival Emperor than the election of a Christian Bishop in the Imperial city. A day was to come when, if men deemed that two great lights were set in the Christian firmament, yet it was Cæsar’s moon that shone with a feebler and reflected light, a light that might suffice to rule the night of earthly things, while the sun of the Pontiff shone with a light that came straight from the Creator’s hand, a greater light to rule the day of man’s spiritual being. It might still be held that God had two earthly Vicars, that two swords were placed by His grant, each in the hand chosen to wield it; but the sword that was wielded by the successor of Augustus was held to be of baser metal and duller edge than the sword that was wielded by the successor of Peter. Great and mighty were those claims, and great and mighty were once the men who put them forth. Even Ghibelins in heart, historic liegemen of Cæsar, must stand by and wonder, if they cannot approve, when Cæsar stands uncrowned, unclad, unheeded, at the Pontiff’s gate, cast down from the throne of the world by a word sent forth from Rome in Rome’s new character. At one moment the lord of fifty legions is left, at the bidding of an unarmed man, without a single sword ready to leave its scabbard at his call. At another moment he whose word has wrought such wonders, himself in turn driven from his church and throne, leaves the world with the protest that it is because he has loved righteousness and hated iniquity that he dies in exile, and is comforted in his dying hour by the answer that in exile he cannot die, seeing God hath given him the nations for his inheritance and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. Rome again rules the world, and again rules it by a moral power; she rules the world so surely that she can again as it were turn her back upon herself; the voice of her Pontiff can speak from Avignon as the voice of her Augustus had once spoken from Ravenna. But we must bear in mind that it was simply because her Emperors had come to speak from Ravenna and from a crowd of other spots other than Rome, that a voice that would have seemed as strange to Constantine as to Trajan had learned to come forth, it might be from Rome, it might be from Clermont or from Lyons. Let us look at the case with the calm gaze of history. History knows nothing of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as the centre of spiritual unity, the divinely commissioned head of the Universal Church. History knows just as little of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as Antichrist and the Man of Sin. It may indeed be the business of history to trace the steps by which either theory arose in men’s minds; but it is not by the light of such theories as these that she will look at the facts of her own science. In the eyes of history the power of the Roman Church grew up simply because it was the Roman Church and the Church of no meaner city. The church founded in the mother and head of all cities could not fail to rank as the mother and head of all churches. Rome, the local Rome, still had life in her to rule, and if her Emperor forsook his calling in the local seat of rule, her Bishop was there to take his place. When the sword of Valentinian was powerless against the Hun, the voice of Leo was ready to charm with all its wisdom. Claudius and Vespasian had brought the elder folk of Britain beneath the earthly yoke of Rome; when their work of a moment had passed away, it was for Gregory to bring another folk of Britain as more abiding dwellers within her ghostly fold. Cæsar after Cæsar had given and taken away the crowns of vassal kings; when Cæsar’s name had become but a shadow in Western lands, it was for the Roman Pontiff to bid shear the locks of the last degenerate Merwing, to pour for the first time the kingly unction on a Frankish head. In all these cases, in a hundred others, Rome still speaks as the head and teacher of the nations; she is driven to speak through the voice of her Bishop simply because her Emperor has forsaken her. How truly, how wholly, it was the constant absence, the frequent weakness, of the Emperor out of which the power of the Pontiff grew will be seen by comparing the story of the Old Rome with the story of the New. At Constantinople the Emperor was ever present, ever reigning; where he dwelled and reigned there was no room for any other power to take to itself the slightest fragment of Imperial rule. Never was any line of princes more deeply impressed with a religious character than the Eastern Cæsars; none more constantly made the Faith, the advancement of the Faith, the humiliation of its enemies, the abiding objects of their policy; their style was the “Faithful Emperor;” their cry of battle was “Victory to the Cross.” Nowhere were Church and State more truly one; but nowhere was the temporal ruler more distinctly in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme. In the West the present Patriarch had well nigh taken the place of the absent Emperor; in the East the present Emperor had well nigh taken on himself the functions of a Patriarch who in his presence was but his creature. Like his pagan predecessors, it was he, and not the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly _Pontifex Maximus_ as well as _Pater Patriæ_. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his cave, in Nikêphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome.

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Mighty and wonderful indeed are those the most brilliant days in the long annals of the Eastern Empire. Crete, Cyprus, Kilikia, won back from the misbelievers--the Roman eagle again spreading her wings over the Euphrates and the Tigris--the cross again planted in what might seem to be its special home at Antioch and Edessa--all show the part which the Eastern Rome in her proudest days could play in that Eternal Question which is in truth the very substance of her whole history. Seated at the junction of two worlds, called into being by her founder as the special guardian of Europe and of those lands of Asia which Europe had made her own, as soon as the strife of West and East had changed into a strife of Christendom and Islam, the Eastern Rome was bound to be the foremost in the strife, or she was untrue to the cause of her own being. The Roman of the East, like the Spaniard of the West, was of necessity a crusader before crusades were preached; with both of them religion and patriotism were in truth the same; men could not deal a blow on behalf of their country which was not also a blow dealt on behalf of their faith. We have already glanced at this greatest of all the many instances of Byzantine power of revival, the great days of the Macedonian Emperors. I call back your thoughts to them again in order to carry out more fully the contrast between the East fighting for its very being against the unbelieving foe, fighting under the leadership of its still present Imperial head, and the West where the Imperial head fell away from the common work of all, and left the leadership of the Empire and of the kingdoms of the West to the spiritual power which stood ready to do the highest of his duties for him. When the West first marched for the deliverance of the East, it was not at the bidding of the Cæsar, but at the bidding of the Pontiff. In earlier days, when the danger was at their own gates, when new Attilas came, year after year, on the old errand of havoc, Germany was indeed ready with men to do once more the work of Aetius and the first Theodoric. The Saxon kings, father and son, knew how to smite the Magyar with blows more crushing than the Hun had tholed on the Catalaunian fields. So, ages after, men were not lacking to smite the Mongol at Lignitz as the Hun and the Magyar had been smitten before him. But in these wars men were fighting for their homes and for their lives, for their faith only as part of their homes and of their lives. When the great cry of all came up, when to fight for the faith was not to fight for men’s own homes and lives but for the homes and lives of others, then the voice that spoke was the voice, not of Rome’s Emperor but of her Bishop. Some months back I strove to draw for you a picture of the great day on which that voice was raised, as part of the tale of the memorable land and city that listened to it. By the Bright Mount of the Arvernian land, in the home of Sidonius and Gregory, the word was spoken, at whose bidding men of every calling short of kingship marched forth to do battle for the sepulchre of Christ. The man to speak the word should have been God’s Vicar in earthly things; he who bade men draw the sword should have been he who could bid them follow him as their loftiest leader; the call to the Holy War should have been in the West, as in the East it ever was, a decree that went forth from Cæsar Augustus. But the two swords had clashed in anger, the two lights shone with hostile brilliancy; the days were passed when the third Otto and the fifth Gregory might have stood side by side at such a gathering; he who now drew the sword at the bidding of Rome’s Emperor could do it only at the risk of the ban of Rome’s oft-times banished Bishop. Alexios Komnênos, vigorous founder of a vigorous dynasty, was still not a Heraclius or a Basil; but in the East the Emperor was still ready in his own place to do his own work; he had not vanished into some land beyond Mount Hæmus, and left a Patriarch who acknowledged him not to do the foremost duty of Empire in his stead.

In later stages of the crusading strife Kings and Emperors of the Romans did indeed take their share; and the greatest success won by any crusaders since the first fell to the lot of the Emperor who more than any other drew down on his head the curses of the spiritual Rome. Conrad went and came back; the elder Frederick died on his march; but the second Frederick, alone of Emperors, alone of European kings, made his way within the long-fought-for walls, and wore a royal crown in the city of Godfrey and of David. Cursed first for not going on the crusade, then cursed again for going, cursed most of all for actually winning the prize of so many struggles, the King of Salem had to fall back on traditions older than Godfrey, older than David; he had to fall back on the kingdom of Melchizedek, to place on his own head the crown which no priestly hand would set there. That the Bishop of the Western Rome should strive to hinder the Emperor of the Western Rome from winning the noblest prize that any Emperor since Heraclius had won, shows more than any other tale in history what a power had sprung up in the bosom of the Empire to supplant the Empire itself. A King of France, a King’s son of England, might go on the now hopeless errand; no Emperor, no German king, was likely to go and seek the misbelievers in the Eastern lands with the memory of Frederick before his eyes. A day was to come when the misbelievers were to come and threaten Emperors and German kings in their own realm. But before that day came, one Emperor, fighting for the last fragment of Rome’s Eastern power, was to win by his fall such glory as no Emperor had for ages won by his triumphs. And, even in the moment of that glorious fall, he was doomed to show that the Bishops of the Western Rome could be as deadly in their friendship to the Cæsars of the East as they could be in their enmity to their own sovereigns, whether on the throne of Charles or on the throne of David.

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I have already spoken of the event of the year 1204, the taking of Constantinople by the Latins, as the point at which we must place the end of the old and unbroken Empire of Rome in the East. High indeed among the crimes and follies of recorded history must we rank that exploit of princely freebooters in crusading garb which broke in pieces the ancient bulwark of Christendom, and left only feeble fragments which could not fail to be swallowed up one by one by the advancing Infidel. Men with the cross on their shoulders, with their swords hallowed to the service of the faith, turned aside from their calling to carve out realms for themselves at the cost of their fellow-Christians, and thereby to do the work of the misbeliever more thoroughly than he could ever have done it for himself. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the paths of the Eastern and Western Emperors had parted so far asunder that the rival claims of the Greek and the German representatives of Rome might well have died out in oblivion. But the Western Rome had now another representative whose claims could not die out. If her Emperor no longer cared to assert his right to the dominion of the world, her Bishop was ever ready to make the claim. The men of the West were taught to look on the Christian East as a schismatic land to be won back to the true obedience; they were taught that it was a worthy work to drive the pastors of the Eastern Churches from their thrones and to instal in their place dependents of the encroaching Bishop of the West. Vassals of Rome in her new character, a spiritual Prusias, a spiritual Herod, were to teach once more the lesson of bondage to Greece and Asia, to bid all lands look once more to the elder Rome as the judge that alone gave forth judgements which none might gainsay. It is indeed due to the memory of the great Innocent to remember that it was not at his bidding, but in direct disobedience to his straitest command, that Frank and Venetian turned their swords against Constantinople instead of wielding them for Jerusalem. It was not at his word or with his approval that men whose calling it was to rescue the Temple of the Lord from misbelieving masters, defiled the church of the Divine Wisdom as no unbelieving master has ever defiled it. But Innocent did not scruple to take advantage of the crimes which he had forbidden, and to enlarge his spiritual dominion by the help of the plunderers whom he had failed to call off from their work of plunder. And so the disunited East, a Christendom in which Christians had ceased to be brethren, stood a ready prey for the Infidel, strong in his unity, strong in the guidance of the mightiest line of princes to whom the championship of the Asiatic, now the Mussulman, side of the Eternal Question had ever fallen.

For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West, more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short; but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge, but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching; he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople, it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour. The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys. The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands of the choicest of their own flesh and blood.

I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the Cæsars, that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity--for the captivity of the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom--has gone on now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now, as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land. And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British interests,” “imperial interests”--the interest perhaps of the usurer wrung from the life-blood of his victim--demand that we should do all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage of the unbelieving stranger in their own land, the men, the women, the children, for whom the swords of better men than they had wrought deliverance. With shame like this done in our own day, we can hardly turn round and throw stones even at the men of the Fourth Crusade. They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which that short glimpse of light has made more black.

[1] May 29, 1885.

Let us remember then, as our story brings the tale of the Eastern Rome to its end, that it was as it were in the night that has just passed that the last Christian worship was paid beneath the dome of Saint Sophia, that it was as it were by the morning light of this very day that the last Constantine took his post by the gate of Saint Rômanos, to die, when to die was all that he could do, for his Empire and for his faith. And yet there is one thought which casts a shadow over the end of the hero and of his power. The last Christian worship beneath the dome of Saint Sophia was a worship paid according to foreign rites, a worship from which the men of the Christian East shrank as from a defilement. So far had the ghostly power of the Western Rome spread its shadow over all lands, that the temporal help of the West could be won only, or rather could be promised only and never won, by treason to the old religious traditions of the East. It was a brighter moment in the memory of our fathers, a moment which has no fellow in our own memory, when three of the great powers of East and West, representing three of the great races of Europe, three of the great divisions of Christendom, Orthodox Russia, Catholic France, Protestant England, fought side by side to break the power of the barbarian on the great day of Navarino.

From the last European survival of the Eastern Rome--for ever remember that a more abiding survival still lingered for a while in Asia--let us turn to another power which we can now look upon as no more than a survival, the last direct survival of the Western Rome. From Constantinople let us turn to Vienna, from the Palaiologos to the Habsburg, from the last Constantine to the first Leopold. For two hundred and thirty years the flood of Ottoman conquest had swept on; it was at last to be stemmed. The Turk appeared, as he had appeared already, before what we must now perchance call the Imperial city of the West. But he fared in another sort from that in which he had fared before the Imperial city of the East. He had made his way into Constantinople; he could not make his way into Vienna. He made his way into Constantinople over the corpse of a slaughtered Emperor; from Vienna he was beaten back, but it was not by the arm of an Emperor that he was beaten back. No king of another land came to the help of Constantine; a king of another land did come to the help of Leopold. Constantine fell by the sword of a foe that was too strong for him; Leopold found a helper who was stronger than his foe, and devoted the full turnings and searchings of an Imperial mind to find out with how little sacrifice of Imperial dignity he could pay some feeble thanks to the man who had saved his throne and life. Vienna was saved for Christendom; it never shared the fate of Belgrade and Buda. But it was the sword of the Slave, the sword of the Pole, that saved it. Look on a hundred years, and the debt is paid in full. Poland is wiped out from the list of nations, and the house that the Pole had saved takes its share of the spoils of its deliverer.

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I have ended my tale of Rome, my tale of Rome in her many shapes and stages, in the last feeble survivals of her power, in the more strange survivals of her mere style. Once more I have to meet you before the year, as years in this place are reckoned, comes to its end. As I began by speaking of a world on which Rome had not yet risen, I must end by speaking of a world from which Rome has passed away.

LECTURE VI.

THE WORLD ROMELESS.

I said in the opening lecture of this series that one of the most wonderful features of the age in which we live, an age which will assuredly take its place in the Universal History of times to come as one of the most memorable of ages, is that the world is Romeless. I said too that this feature of the most modern times is, by one of the great cycles of history, a feature which takes us back to the earliest days of European life. The world from which Rome has passed away has something in common with the world in which Rome had never shown herself. It has something in common with it which it has not in common with those later ages during which Rome, in one shape or another, under one form of influence or another, was the acknowledged centre of all European and Christian lands. But this is one of those many truths which can be grasped only by those who look at European history as a whole, and who are not led away by the delusive voices which would teach them that this or that fragment of the unbroken tale can be mastered by itself apart from the other acts of the one drama. He who shuts up his books and he who opens his books at any arbitrary point in Rome’s long story are alike shut out from any true conception of the place of Rome in the world’s history; they are shut out from understanding the difference between an age in which Rome is and an age in which Rome is not. To their eyes the fact that the world is Romeless will not seem anything wonderful, anything distinctive, because they have never looked with any searching gaze at the ages in which the world was otherwise. Such an one will never see that the great feature of the most modern times, a feature which has reached its height in the times in which we ourselves live, is the absence of any such centre as the world so long gathered itself around. And if he will not see that the world is Romeless, still less will he see that even the Romeless world is not as though Rome had never been. Rome is still eternal in her influence; the world in truth has been for ages so steeped in Roman influences that those influences have ceased to be Roman. But Rome, as a visible and acknowledged centre, has passed away. No longer does an undivided world look to a single Rome as its one undoubted head. No longer does a divided world look to an Eastern and a Western Rome as each the undoubted head of half the world of civilized man. Rome œcumenical in either of her seats has become a thing that is no longer. The younger Rome has passed from us to be the spoil of the barbarian. The elder, by a fate at once more and less hopeful, has sunk to be the local capital of a single European kingdom. The younger, in her present distress, has the loftier hopes for the future. Her very oppressors have in some sort kept on her traditions; they have kept her in her old place as the head of something more than a mere local realm. We are far more likely to see Christian Constantinople again step into her old heritage as the head of Eastern Christendom than to see the lands of the West again accept the headship of the elder Rome by the Tiber. The line of her Cæsars is broken, broken, we may be sure, for ever. Her Pontiffs have not wisdom enough to see how their œcumenical position has been raised by deliverance from the shackles of local sovereignty. But to him who begins at the middle or at the end, to him who leaves off at the middle--to him who, under the influence of either error, has not given his mind to grasp the whole tale from the kingship on the Palatine to the kingship on the Quirinal--the things which make our own age so wonderful are things which lack a meaning. He who vainly dreams that he will better understand his own times by beginning his historic work with the times immediately before them--he who listens to false charmers who bid him seek, perhaps historic honours but assuredly not historic knowledge, by preferring the flashy glitter of some sixth or seventh period to the solid work of his Gregory or his Einhard--he will find out--no, he will never learn enough to find out--that there is no royal road to the knowledge even of his own times. His penalty will be to walk in an age as strange and memorable as any that went before it, and not to know in how strange and memorable an age it is in which he is walking.

We live then in a Romeless age, and to those who have eyes to see it is one of the chief wonders of our age that it is Romeless. But our age is Romeless because we live in a world from which Rome has passed away; those far-gone ages were Romeless because Rome had not yet made her way to the place which the world’s destiny had marked for her. The position of those ages in the general tale of European history was the subject of the first lecture of this course six weeks back. In that lecture and in the one which followed it I strove to point out how Rome, having by slow steps risen to the first place in the West, burst suddenly into the midst of another political system, a system of kingdoms and commonwealths which was in many points a forestalling of the political system of the world in which we now live. And we may go yet further back, to days when Rome was so far from being the head of the world that her name could hardly have been known in the world. By one of the strange cycles of history, we who dwell in the wide world of modern times, the world of continents and oceans--nothing better shows its vastness than that we are driven to form a plural for this last primæval name--have in some points come back to the state of those who dwelled in the narrow world of the earliest times, the little world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas. We have come back to the state of things that was, not only before Rome stood forth to rule the nations, but before Macedonian kingdoms and Greek confederations had cut short the right of every single town on its hill or in its island to act as a sovereign state in the affairs of the world. Each nation now, like each city then, does what is right in its own eyes. A nation now, like a city then, may be kept back from the exercise of its inherent powers by dread of the physical strength of some mightier neighbour. But the nations now, like the cities then, acknowledge no common centre of lawful rule, no power which can speak to all with an authority higher than that of physical strength. From our age the great vision of Dante’s Monarchy has passed away, and we have so far gone back to the condition of the ages before whose eyes that wondrous vision had never shown itself. The best witness to this fact is to be found in the acknowledged importance and the confessed difficulty of the doctrine of International Law. At no time has it ever been more needful than it is now to have a system of rules by which a number of independent powers shall acknowledge themselves to be bound. At no time has it been found harder to enforce that system of rules by any practical sanction. The simplest way perhaps is that the weak state shall be held bound to the strictest observance of every international rule in its dealings with the stronger, but that the stronger shall be held to be absolved from the like pedantic minuteness in its dealings with the weaker. A fancied insult, for instance, at the hands of Greece is held to demand a humiliating atonement which would certainly not be asked for in the like case at the hands of Germany. But the most subtle International lawyer has failed to devise any means, save the last argument of all, for bringing a great power to reason which, to put it delicately, puts its own construction on international rules, and is so fully convinced of the truth of that construction that it declines to submit their interpretation to the decision of any arbiter. So it was in the days when the civilized world was bounded by the independent commonwealths of Greece. In theory certain rules or customs were held to bind every Greek state in its dealings with every other Greek state. Certain acts which were deemed lawful if done towards barbarians were deemed unlawful if done towards fellow-Greeks. Such rules differed in no essential respect from the International Law of modern times. There is simply a verbal difficulty in applying the name to the old Greek world, a difficulty arising out of the fact that, in our present state of things, nations have taken the place of cities. But among Greek cities there was just the same difficulty in finding a sanction for the wholesome rules laid down by Greek tradition or religion which there is in finding the like sanction now. There was no common temporal authority; we can hardly say that there was a common spiritual authority. The Amphiktyonic Council had but feeble claims even to the last position; its decrees went practically for nothing, unless some powerful state undertook to carry them out for its own purposes, and claimed in return to determine what they should be. In the days of the great Peloponnesian war we do not hear of the Amphiktyons at all. Then and later, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, could trifle at pleasure with the rights of a weaker city, subject only to the chance that some other among the stronger cities might find it suit its interests to assert the rights of the weaker. Every Greek city had in theory an equal right to independence; but Messênê, Skiônê, and Plataia felt how hard it sometimes was to assert that right. A treaty graven on a stone went for little, an Amphiktyonic decree went for less, when a powerful and ambitious city had other purposes to carry out. Such a treaty, such a decree, went for about as much as the agreement of a modern European congress when it binds itself to secure the freedom of Epeiros and the good government of Armenia. The voice of some one overbearing city, say Sparta backed by the will of the Great King, counted for far more. The rise of the Macedonian power under two renowned princes gave the Greek world for a short space a centre and a head. International law or its substitutes went for little when Alexander, flushed with Asiatic conquest, wrote to all the cities of Greece to restore their exiles. But when the Macedonian kingdom again became only one power among many, the old state of things came back again with the needful changes. The world of Greece was no longer a world of cities only; it was a world in which cities, kingdoms, and confederations all played their part, a world in which diplomacy had its full run, in which the eastern seas of Europe were ever covered by embassies crossing one another in their endless voyages to the court of this or that prince, to the assembly of this or that confederation. It was into this busy world of complicated International dealings that the power of Rome burst like a thunderbolt. All was at once changed. Under the Roman Peace, indeed in days long before the Roman Peace was formally established, as soon as Rome became by common consent the arbiter of the Mediterranean world, International Law had small opportunities left of showing its strength or its weakness. For a while the independent powers of the civilized world received as law whatever decrees the mightiest among them, the Roman Senate, thought good to put forth in each particular case. As kingdoms sank into provinces, as independent cities sank into municipalities, the law of the one commonwealth into whose substance they were in a manner merged became the immediate law of the whole civilized world, with the might of Cæsar Augustus as its sanction. There might still be a _jus gentium_ between Rome and Parthia; to settle such questions as might arise at Antioch, at Gades, or at Eboracum, there was only the law of the Roman city of which all other cities had become suburbs.

As long as any shadow of Roman power lasted, the theory that there lived on at Rome a central judgement-seat for the world was never wholly forgotten. As East and West became, not only separate but hostile, as the Western Pontiff stepped for many purposes into the place of the Western Emperor, it was the ecclesiastical rather than the Imperial Rome to which the nations sought as their common judge. Still in either case it was Rome that spoke; the world at least of Western Europe still acknowledged a centre by the Tiber, though that centre might have shifted from the Regia and the Septizonium to the Lateran and the Vatican. The world of which the Lateran and the Vatican were centres was presently cut short by a spiritual revolt. And that spiritual revolt was largely measured by national distinctions. As Eastern Europe, Greek and Slavonic Europe, had never admitted the spiritual dominion of the Western Rome, so now Teutonic Europe cast that dominion aside. Nations which had, in the teeth of Emperors, asserted their independence in the affairs of the world, now asserted their independence no less in the range of man’s spiritual being. The Church of Rome remained, like the Empire of Rome, a power mighty and venerable, but a power confined, if not within the bounds of a single nation, at least within the bounds of a group of nations closely connected in history and speech. As there was a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so there was now a Holy Roman Church of the Latin-speaking folk. In one important point indeed we may say that the range of the new Roman power was narrowed yet further. There was a time when the bishopric of Rome, with all that the bishopric of Rome carried with it, was, in practice as well as in theory, open to men of all nations that admitted the spiritual power of Rome. Now, though no law forbids the election of a Pope of any nation, in practice the choice of the electors has long been confined to men of Italian birth. This privilege indeed might be looked on as in some sort a survival or revival of local Roman supremacy; more truly it is a falling back on days before the spiritual supremacy of Rome began. It is a falling back on times when the Roman church, still a local church though the first of local churches, naturally sought for its chiefs among its own members. But so far as it is a falling back in either sense, it is a falling back in a shape better fitted for later times; here again the nation takes the place of the city; Italy takes the place of Rome. In short the Roman Church, still in theory coextensive with the world, once really coextensive with Western Europe, has shrunk up into a body mainly Latin with a head exclusively Italian. It is indeed only in a broad and general sense that we can take such propositions as that the Latin nations clave to Rome while the Teutonic nations fell away. That there are many exceptions needs no proof. It is plain that the Roman Church can still boast herself of not a few Teutonic and Slavonic subjects. It is no less plain that there are here and there, though in smaller numbers, men of Latin speech, both in East and West, who are not her subjects. Still the general proposition is none the less true in its general sense. It marks, to say the least, general tendencies which run a certain course wherever there is no special cause to hinder them. If we look narrowly into each case of exception, we shall often see some special cause, commonly some political cause, which accounts for the anomaly. We may note further that, as the Empire became more purely German and the Papacy became more purely Latin, the old feuds between Empire and Papacy died out. The Austrian Emperors, Catholic chiefs of an Empire mainly Protestant, had no such warfare to wage with the Roman see as had been waged by the Franconians and the Swabians. But as Empire and Papacy alike came to be thus shut up within narrowed and definite limits, neither could any longer act as a common centre, even for the Western lands. For better or for worse, the world has fallen back on an older state of things. Instead of a single Rome as the acknowledged head of all, instead of two rival Romes, each claiming the headship of its own half of the civilized world, it is now open to every nation, as in the earlier day it was open to every city, to do, as far as it finds to do it, that which is right in its own eyes. Every nation now, as every city then, may play the part of Rome for the years or for the moments through which it may keep enough of physical strength to play that part.

The latest times then are in truth a return to the earliest times, with this difference, that nations have taken the place of cities. Two of the masters of history in later times have pointed out the close analogy between the mutual relations of the cities of old Greece and those of the nations of modern Europe. The lesson has been taught us in its fulness alike by Arnold and by Grote. It hardly fell within the scope of either master to point out how truly the likeness is a cycle, how the later state of things is a return to the earlier, after the existence for many ages of a state of things wholly unlike either. They were hardly called on to dwell upon the causes which have brought about this return to an earlier state of things, or on the causes which made that return, as every return to an earlier state of things must be, a return only partial, a return largely modified by the events which have taken place in the meanwhile. It was enough for them to point the analogy. And the analogy is answer enough to those shallowest of the shallow who go about winning cheers from half-taught audiences by declaiming on the uselessness of studying the institutions of “petty states” and by asking what can be gained by knowing about battles fought two thousand years ago. The substitution of the nation for the city is, from one side, part of the process which we may, for our purposes, call the physical growth of the world. The world in which we live is in physical extent vastly bigger than the first civilized world of old Greece, vastly bigger than the far wider Mediterranean world of Rome. What the Ægæan and its borderlands once were, what the Mediterranean and its borderlands once were, Ocean and his borderlands, his borderlands spread over so many continents and islands, are now. No one ought to be more ready than students of political history to welcome every modern scientific invention. The discoveries which have gone so far to annihilate distance ought to call up our deepest thankfulness. But we are perhaps thankful for them on other grounds than those for which they are prized by their own inventors; we are certainly thankful for them on other grounds from those for which they are prized by those who go about bragging about the worthlessness even of the knowledge of times when those inventions were unknown. The steamer, the railway, the telegraph, are wholesome and necessary institutions; they are wholesome and necessary in order to hinder man’s intellectual and political life from being crushed by mere physical extension. They allow the England of our day to come nearer to the Athens of Periklês than the England of a hundred years back, of fifty years back. They allow the United States of America, spread over a world wider than any age of Roman empire, to abide as a Confederation free and united, the true fellow of the old Achaia shut up within the bounds of Peloponnêsos. They are needful in an age when nations have taken the place of cities, that they may make the nations really the political equals of the cities. You may again, some of you, chance to hear some smatterer sneering at petty states ignorant of the great discoveries of natural science. Tell him that the highest use of the discoveries of natural science has been to raise large states to the political level of small ones.

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