bodies of men, spread over vast territorial areas, in orderly and
peaceful relations with one another. The empire of Trajan and Marcus
Aurelius still remained the greatest known example of political
aggregation; and men who argued from simple historic precedent without
that power of analyzing precedents which the comparative method has
supplied, came not unnaturally to the conclusions that great political
aggregates have an inherent tendency towards breaking up, and that great
political aggregates cannot be maintained except by a strongly-
centralized administration and at the sacrifice of local self-
government. A century ago the very idea of a stable federation of forty
powerful states, covering a territory nearly equal in area to the whole
of Europe, carried on by a republican government elected by universal
suffrage, and guaranteeing to every tiniest village its full meed of
local independence,--the very idea of all this would have been scouted
as a thoroughly impracticable Utopian dream. And such scepticism would
have been quite justifiable, for European history did not seem to afford
any precedents upon which such a forecast of the future could be
logically based. Between the various nations of Europe there has
certainly always existed an element of political community, bequeathed
by the Roman empire, manifested during the Middle Ages in a common
relationship to the Church, and in modern times in a common adherence to
certain uncodified rules of international law, more or less im perfectly
defined and enforced. Between England and Spain, for example, or between
France and Austria, there has never been such utter political severance
as existed normally between Greece and Persia, or Rome and Carthage. But
this community of political inheritance in Europe, it is needless to
say, falls very far short of the degree of community implied in a
federal union; and so great is the diversity of language and of creed,
and of local historic development with the deep-seated prejudices
attendant thereupon, that the formation of a European federation could