this nations were required, and the Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier than any other countries of the West—England in a form which has lasted substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But Italy and Germany—and especially the latter—remained disintegrated until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy, naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with European unity. We have to check and to assimilate—if the world is to live as one—the one Power which has hitherto developed most persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home. Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire