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Rh cessant and useless wars abroad, ambitious display at home, and a deep-rooted intolerance of the very existence of neighboring nations made friendly contact impossible, and precluded all idea of mutual development along lines of divergent and independent existence. The Hellenic civilization gave birth to the idea of individual freedom and favored the development of the little community of which he formed a part; it also contributed materially to the upbuilding of municipal and colonial institutions; but the Greek conquests were commercial rather than administrative, and no people of Hellenic stock ever realized in practice that conception of abiding loyalty to the commonwealth which lay at the foundation of the great lawmaking state under whose imperial dominion the civilized world enjoyed, for the first time since history began, the inestimable blessings of universal peace. It is not too much to say that no greater contribution to human happiness and progress than this has ever emanated from the mind of man.

It must be conceded, however, that the policy of constant territorial expansion which was pursued by the Romans from the earliest times, and was steadfastly adhered to until the empire included within its borders the entire civilized world, interposed a barrier to the establishment of states upon independent foundations, and thus operated to prevent the development among them of a system of international law in the modern acceptation of the term. But the gradual subjection of the civilized world to the dominion of Rome, while it arrested the development of international law, operated, so long as it existed, to render such a system of law unnecessary.

The forces making against enlightenment which brought about the downfall of the Western Empire shattered but did not completely destroy the great fabric of Roman civilization, of which some germs remained in the commercial cities of the Italian peninsula, whose maritime power was sufficient to protect their merchant adventurers who had established trade relations with the East, and even with the barbaric races who inhabited the shores of the Black and Baltic seas. And it was out of these relations—sometimes hostile, sometimes peaceful, but always commercial—of the city republics of Italy and the North Sea that the law of nations had its humble beginnings. The crude bodies of rules which, as they affected chiefly the commercial undertakings of the cities that recognized them, came to be known as sea laws, contain the foundation of modern international law.

Unquestionably the most powerful influence that was exerted upon the science of international law during its formative period was that of the Roman Church. As the political power of the Western Empire decayed and finally disappeared, the Church—an organization having at once a religious and a secular aspect—became for a time the most powerful organ of civilization in that portion of western Europe which had formerly acknowledged the sway of the Roman emperors.

The conception of universal peace through universal dominion which had been so splendidly realized by Augustus and his immediate successors made a profound impression upon the minds of Charlemagne and the state-builders of the Middle Ages, and it is a tribute to the abiding influence of the Roman jurists that the theory of universal sovereignty should have survived the downfall of the empire, and that it should have been deemed necessary in the Middle Ages to find a substitute for it in existing institutions. Such a substitute was found in the empire founded by Charlemagne, but with an important modification. The temporal head of Christendom was the German emperor; its spiritual head was the Roman pontiff; but as the line of division was not sharply drawn, these personages often came into conflict, and the international law of the Middle Ages was enormously influenced by the conflicting claims of the Pope and the Emperor. As the imperial power at any time depended largely upon the personal influence and character of the emperors, and as no line of political policy was long adhered to by them, the papacy, having a determined and well-settled policy, in time began to acquire preponderance even in temporal affairs.

During the period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and as a consequence of the decline of the feudal