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 was mainly political and military. It
lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which
supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured
for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and
pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full
force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal
structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have
absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual
fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and
derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the
moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect
and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and
the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy
and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge
and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a
more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed
in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love
of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences
of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to
Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit