thing like a monopoly of the world's trade, the British Empire was all but allowed to fall to pieces; it has needed the challenge of Germany to draw it together in a strong group-consciousness. So long as the threat of French domination on the North American continent continued, the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard were well content to form part of the British Empire. It was not until after the conquest of Canada that they became conscious of their separate rights and interests as against the Mother Country and, striking for independence, threw off its protecting aegis. The splendid isolation of the United States beyond the ocean brought its dangers in turn; the interests of the States and groups of States within the Union, never very firmly cemented, drew apart in the absence of external pressure, until the great Federation was all but shattered by the war between North and South. The tendency of federations, or of other more or less loosely compacted political groups, has in short been to break up in the absence of any need for common defence against external enemies. Can we suppose that a world federation, of which the very raison d'être is to remove the apprehension of war, will prove more stable?

Those federations which have survived have done so because, as in the case of the United States, they have developed a common sentiment far stronger than any which may divide their constituent States, based on the consciousness of interests, traditions, and ideals distinguishing them from other political groups. They have survived, in short, because they have become nations. Looking upon the world as it is, it is difficult to believe that any such powerful cement of sentiment could be found to bind together even the civilised peoples, not to mention the half-civilised and the uncivilised. In the absence of such a sentiment any international organisation which might be devised would depend for such stability as it might possess on a system of checks and balances, which in the long run would prove no more effective in keeping the peace between nations than the expedients of the old diplomacy.

It will be objected to this that it is mere assertion: at best the expression of an opinion based upon historical precedents which may, and probably will, have no application to the changed circumstances of the future. This is perhaps true. Yet the light of experience, or of reason applied to experience,

is the only light that it is safe for us to follow among the snares and pitfalls of a tenebrous world. This truth has always, indeed, received at least partial recognition from the champions of a European confederation, or of a world union, as the case might be. From the first they have pointed to existing groups of federated sovereign States as giving a foundation of fact to ideals which might otherwise be recognised as unsubstantial, and they have been careful to frame their plans on existing models. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the most obvious model for a league of nations was the Holy Roman Empire, which was still in theory regarded as the world's centre of political unity'; and upon this all the various projects of peace, from that of Emeric Crucé to those of the Abbé de St. Pierre and his successors, were more or less closely based. In 1806 the Empire came to an end; and in 1815 the Congress of Vienna refused to restore it, in spite of the clamour of the lesser German princes and the protests of the Papacy. But meanwhile a new model had been set up beyond the ocean in the Federal Constitution of the United States of America, which was destined by reason of its vast territorial expansion, as well as of its general effectiveness within the wide limits of its jurisdiction, to impress the imagination of men as perhaps the nearest approximation as yet attained to the ideal of an inter-State union. Finally, the close of the Napoleonic wars saw not only the attempt of the Great Powers to govern Europe in concert in the interests of peace, but the establishment in the German Confederation of an international organisation which, in the eyes of certain contemporary enthusiasts, was destined to become the centre ' of the States-system' and to develop into a Confederation of Europe.

So far, then, as the mere substructures of their systems are concerned, the various projects of peace have a basis in experience. But little or no attempt has been made to bring the light of experience to bear on the vital question of how far these substructures can be trusted to carry the immensely greater weight which it is proposed to place upon them. Yet surely it is but a counsel of prudence to inquire, before committing the world to the building of an international sky'scraper' on the American model, what lessons are to be derived from the record of less pretentious edifices erected on similar

foundations. This inquiry cannot, of course, be made exhaustive within the limits of the present article; but enough evidence may be adduced at least to excuse, if not to justify, the doubts expressed as to the practicability and desirability of establishing an organised international government. In order to keep the subject within reasonable limits, illustrations will be drawn only from the history of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation, and the United States of America.

In spite of the great changes in the world's order since the Holy Empire ceased to exist, even in name, there is a good Ideal in the history of the last centuries of its existence that bears on our inquiry. The reorganisation of the Imperial Government by the Emperor Maximilian I. in certain respects actually anticipated some of the features now suggested for an international system. At the Diet of Augsburg, in August 1485, private war was forbidden, and jurisdiction over breaches of the public peace (Landesfrieden) was given to the new Imperial Chamber (Reichskammergericht), composed of trained jurists, who represented not the Emperor but the Empire, and were appointed by and responsible to the Diet. The decisions of the Chamber were in the last resort to be enforced by the Imperial army, to which contingents were to be contributed by each of the circles into which the Empire was divided; it was to be set in motion, after the ban of the Empire had been proclaimed against the recalcitrant State, by the Emperor with the consent of the Diet. The Empire had long since lost the character of a unitary State: it had in effect become a confederation of princes, great and small, secular and religious, and of city republics. This character, accentuated after the abdication of the Emperor Charles V. in 1556, was confirmed after the Thirty Years' War by the terms of the Peace of Westphalia, which, while preserving the semblance of Imperial authority and the central organs of the Empire, really erected the estates' of the Empire into sovereign States. The Imperial Diet lost all semblance of a parliament in our sense, and from 1663 onwards assumed definitely the character of a permanent congress of envoys.

It was by an unhappy process of decay and disruption that the Empire had thus acquired the character of an international federation, and it certainly required a large faith to

see in it the model or the nucleus of a world-union. Yet Leibnitz not only approved the conception of the Abbé de St. Pierre in basing his league to enforce peace on this model, but had himself many years earlier set forth a similar project, differing only in the proposal that the Empire itself was to become the effective temporal head of Christendom,' and as such to pursue the common good and, without striking 'a blow, to keep the swords in their scabbards.'* Leibnitz was not only a philosopher: he was also a practical man of affairs. The splendid vision of a reformed and strengthened Empire united with a reformed and strengthened Papacy to keep the peace in the universal Christian Republic was doubtless to him an attractive theme for abstract political speculation. But in 1670 the pressing need of the moment was to protect Germany and Europe against the ambitious designs of Louis XIV., and for this practical purpose Leibnitz recognised that the Empire was useless. The plan he proposed is interesting as anticipating, in somewhat similar circumstances, that of the League to Enforce Peace. This was the formation of a new Alliance, with a central Directory in permanent session at Frankfurt, to which the Powers of the Triple Alliance-England, Holland, and Sweden-should be invited to adhere. Its point was directed against France, but Leibnitz contemplated the perfecting of the league by her ultimate inclusion.† The project, however, was still-born, and before the treatise was even finished the French invasion of Lorraine had relegated its arguments to the world of dreams.

It is germane to our purpose to note the reasons given by Leibnitz for the impotence of the Empire. It lacked a permanent executive council, a common treasury, a standing army-in short, the effective organs of a centralised State. In the absence of these it was impossible to compel the Estates to pay their contributions, at least regularly, and impossible to collect their armed contingents in time to be of any use, if at all. The deliberations of the Diet had degenerated into a solemn parade, and, with much ceremonious debate about trifles, it transacted nothing of importance. As for the

• Bedenken welchgestalt Securitas Publica interna et externa, etc., 94. Euvres (Paris, 1865), vi. p. 133. + Ibid. § 21.

+ Ibid. p. 124.

Imperial Chamber, in view of the uncertainty of the rules of law it had to apply, it had become the happy hunting-ground of hungry jurists, and in the extreme dilatoriness of its procedure it easily beat the record of the old English Court of Chancery. In short, the Holy Empire, as an experiment in international government, was certainly not encouraging. It completely failed to keep the peace between the German States; and, so far as it possessed any collective weight, this was used merely to turn the scale on the one side or the other in the constant struggle to maintain the balance between the greater and more aggressive Powers. At best it illustrated, almost to the point of caricature, the probable fate of a league of nations founded on any less secure basis than a common group-consciousness far stronger than the separate consciousness of its component national elements.

In its essential features the history of the German Confederation established in 1815 is a repetition of that of the later developments of the Holy Roman Empire, but as an objectlesson it is even more striking. It may be noted at the outset that, whatever it was in fact, de jure the Empire was a unitary State. Leibnitz, indeed, was at pains to show that the obligations of the princes to Emperor and Empire did not detract from their status as sovereigns*; but when, in 1700, the Elector of Brandenburg became King of Prussia the style assumed showed that the status of independent sovereign implied in the royal title was recognised only in respect of those of his territories which lay outside the Empire. The Constitution established in Germany by the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, on the other hand, was definitively that of a Con'federation of Sovereign States.' Moreover, not only had the leading German Power, Austria, great territories outside Germany, but three foreign sovereigns were represented in the Diet of the Confederation in respect of their German territories: the King of England as King of Hanover, the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein, and the King of the Netherlands as Duke of Luxemburg. The essentially international character of the Confederation was thus from the first accentuated, and was recognised when the right of the

* See Caesarini Fürstenerii De Jure Suprematus ac Legationis principum Germaniae. Cap. xii. 1696.