which were read all over Christendom in the Middle Ages, you will find that the historian, as a matter of course, starts from the assumption of the unity of the Christian Commonwealth, and that he regards Christendom as a whole.

I come here this afternoon to try to plead for the restoration of the medieval conception of the unity of civilisation, brought up to date, secularised and informed with a new and a wider outlook. I also want you to realise that that conception of world citizenship-for such it was which dominated Europe, or at any rate the better mind of Europe, for a thousand years, was lost under the double impact of the Renaissance and the Reformation: the Renaissance, which secularised thought and overthrew the spell of authority; and the Reformation, which broke the religious life of Christendom into two parts. For the last four centuries we have lived in an atmosphere from which the conception of world citizenship has almost entirely disappeared, to the unspeakable loss of the modern world.

About four hundred years ago, dating roughly from Machiavelli, the conception of sovereignty came into the modern world-the conception that every State was supreme, responsible only to itself, without any obligations to other States, without any obligations to the community of

mankind, and without paying any more than lip homage either to a divine ruler of mankind or to the divine voice within. This doctrine of the unfettered sovereignty of the individual State has in my opinion been the curse of the modern world. It has been bad for civilisation as a whole, and it has been degrading for every State where it has been adopted. It is not the invention and has not been the property of any one country. I have traced it to Machiavelli, because Machiavelli was the first and remains to this day one of the most powerful political thinkers who ever lived; and his great achievement-his great and baneful achievement-was to divorce politics from ethics. What Machiavelli began was continued by men like Hobbes in England and Hegel in Germany, and has become something like an established commonplace of statesmen and of publicists in every country in the world. If any doctrine has ever been decisively condemned by the experience of its results, it has been the doctrine of the unfettered sovereignty of the individual State, which carried with it the denial of the conception of world citizenship.

For the last four centuries there has been a struggle going on for the soul of man between the doctrine of world citizenship, which was at any rate adumbrated in the Middle Ages, and

the newer doctrine of purely secular and national politics. This struggle has mirrored itself not only in the acts of rulers and politicians, but also in the writings and the ideals of publicists. I am afraid we must say that the conception of world citizenship was the creed of a very tiny minority from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth; but all the time there were men who looked back to the days when Europe was spiritually united and looked forward to the time when Europe, and indeed the world, might once again be spiritually united on the broader basis of a common humanity and on the broader basis of the obligations which every member of the human family feels and ought to feel to every other.

And this process, this antagonism, has now led us to a period where I think the tide has at last begun to turn. I regard the Great War as the inevitable result and the final disproof of the truth and value of narrow-hearted and narrow-minded nationalism, and I believe that the best thought and the best mind of the day in all countries without exception is turning back to the medieval conception of world citizenship, brought up to date, transferred from a theological to an ethical foundation, and enlarged until it embraces at any rate all the civilised countries of the world. This process has been

assisted not only by the bankruptcy of the old doctrine of sovereignty which was revealed in the Great War, but also by our experience of the results of the struggle.

One of the tasks of the historian is to realise that his duty is to inquire into and to explain the whole life of humanity. As I am addressing some teachers, I should like to point out that it is impossible to deal with the history of any one country in isolation from the main stream of human development. As we are English people, and as we teach more English history than any other history, just let me remind you that it is quite impossible to teach English history faithfully, clearly or wisely without keeping continually in mind the fact that it is only a portion of a very much larger story. What are the most fundamental elements in our national life and in the nationality of every modern State? The first is race, the second is language, and the third is religion.

If you take what we call the British race, it is mixed to a degree which it requires an effort to realise. The first racial element which we can trace in our land is what we call the Iberian, which connects us with the early civilisation of Spain and North Africa; the second element was the British; and the third was the Roman. But there was no such thing as Roman blood.

The blood that was brought into Britain and mixed with British blood during the four centuries of the Roman occupation was Roman only in name, because the Roman administrators and the Roman garrisons were drawn from every part of the known world—from Europe, from Northern Africa and from Western Asia. They all came to Britain, and large numbers of them married and left traces of their blood here. After the Romans we had two great series of Teutonic invasions, and after that we had the infiltration of the Norman blood, which had been enriched by long residence in the North of France but which retained the vigour of its northern an

cestors.

Since then we have had at intervals most valuable contributions to the common stock of what we call English or British blood, from the Flemings, the Huguenots, and in the nineteenth century from almost every nation under heaven. Therefore our blood, which is the most fundamental thing in our life, mutely speaks to us of world citizenship, and tells us that we are part of the great human family.

In a slightly lesser degree our language teaches us the same truth. Our language is not a Teutonic language, as some people used to say and as some people still appear to think. It is a mixture. The basis is Teutonic, but the super