It was little wonder that in such times the old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there developed—at any rate in England and in Germany-a national Church. The unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone. Cuius regio eius religio. To each region its religion; and to each nation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begun as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan representative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and Lope de Vega in Spain.

In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind. It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain England was seeking to maintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a world with which we are familiar-a world of national languages, national religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity. But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend the bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz, fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; and a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenth century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it could play the part of an international university, and provide a common centre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity of the Middle Ages was gone-gone past recall. Between those days and the new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much was lost that could never be recovered;

and if new gold was added to the currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. It would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the new world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the old world was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will say in his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evil spirits-nationalism and commercialism. One thing is perhaps certain. We cannot, as far as human sight can discern, ever hope to reconstruct unity on the old basis. of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages. Yet need is upon us still-need urgent and importunate-to find some unity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Some have hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought that international finance and commerce would build the foundations of an international polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of war has shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply no further unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science, and may trust that the collaboration of the nations in the building of the common house of knowledge will lead to co-operation in the building of a greater mansion for the common society of civilized mankind. But nationalism can pervert even knowledge to its own ends, turning anthropology to politics, and chemistry to war. There remains a last hope -the hope of a common ethical unity, which, as moral convictions slowly settle into law, may gradually grow concrete in a common public law of the world. Even this hope can only be modest, but it is perhaps the wisest and the surest of all our hopes. Idem scire is a good thing; but men of all nations may know the same thing, and yet remain strangers one to another. Idem velle idem nolle in re publica, ea demum firma amicitia est. The nations

will at last attain firm friendship one with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scope of public things. And when they have attained this friendship, then-on a far higher level of economic development and with an improvement by each nation of its talent which is almost entirely new-they will have found again, if in a different medium, something of the unity of mediaeval civilization.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History, vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 3; vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans.

Lord Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.

A. J. and R. W. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. W. Blackwood.

H. W. C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library). Williams & Norgate.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and 'Empire'.

J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, Appendix I. Longmans.

Bede Jarrett, Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages. T. C. and E. C. Jack.

E. Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages. Murray.

F. W. Maitland, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated from Gierke's Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. Maitland. Cambridge University Press.

R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought. Williams & Norgate.

H. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

H. O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind. Macmillan.

E. Tröltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (II. Kapitel). P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper.

V

UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

You know the story of Sophocles' Antigone: how, when two brothers disputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out and brought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle. Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no one shall give burial to the traitor who has borne arms against his native land. The obligation to give or allow decent burial, even to an enemy, was one which the Greeks held peculiarly sacred. Yet obedience to the orders of lawful authority is an obligation binding on every citizen. No one dares to disregard the king's order save the dead man's sister. She is caught in the act and brought before the king. ' And thou,' he says, ' didst indeed dare to transgress this law?' 'Yes,' answers Antigone,' for it was not Zeus that published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the Gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.'1

There you have the assertion of a law supreme and binding on all men, eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment.

And now turn to this passage from the traveller and historian Herodotus, an almost exact contemporary of Sophocles. He has been telling how Cambyses, king of 1 Sophocles, Antigone, 449-57 (Jebb's translation).

the Persians, has been wantonly insulting the religion and customs of the Egyptians. 'The man must have been mad,' he says:

'For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon consideration would choose those of his own country: so far do men go in thinking their own laws the best. Therefore it is not likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things. And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by many proofs, and above all by this story. For when Darius was king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked them, 'How much money would you take to eat your fathers when they die?' And they answered that they would not do this at any price. After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was said, 'How much money would you take to burn with fire your fathers when they die?' And they cried with a great voice that he should speak no such blasphemy. Thus it is that men think, and I hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law was king over all.'1

There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarch commanding here this, there that.

This capricious arbitrary aspect of law was a thing which much impressed the Greeks. They contrasted the varying, artificial arrangements made by mankind with the constancy and simplicity of nature. We speak of nature and convention; they contrasted things that are by nature with things that are by law. It was a contrast that bore fruit later on.

Now law, whose arbitrariness and variety so much impressed the Greeks was the law not so much of this place or that, as of this or that community and its members. This is a conception quite different from that of the modern

1 Herodotus, iii. 38.