but at another moment he cries triumphantly: “We who drink of the Rhone and the Orontes are all one nation.” The feeling which Claudian expresses persisted throughout the Middle Ages. The German states in Italy recognized it by putting the portrait of the Eastern Emperor on their coins. As Poole remarks in his _Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought_: “The Empire of Charlemagne was no mere resuscitation of the extinct empire of the West. It was the continuation of that universal empire, whose seat Constantine had established at Byzantium, but whose existence there was now held to have terminated by the succession of a woman, the empress Irene.... The empire, therefore, went back to its rightful seat, and its title devolved on Charlemagne.” All the minor rulers also throughout the civilized parts of Europe thought of their authority as coming to them from the Roman Empire. This feeling of unity was kept up by the use of the old Roman highways of commerce, by the employment of the Latin language as the _lingua franca_ of Europe, by the Church, and by the continued use of Roman law. Roman law in particular was a stabilizing influence for many centuries after the dissolution of the Empire. In the East and in the portions of Italy controlled by Justinian’s successors the _Code_ of Justinian was in force. Roman law entered largely also into the _Breviary_ of Alaric, the laws of the Burgundians, the edict of Theodoric, and the French capitularies. The law of Justinian was taught in the schools of Rome and Ravenna without much interruption from the sixth to the eleventh century, and with the revival of commerce which followed the Crusades, there was a vigorous development of Roman mercantile law. After the tenth century “the trend was toward unity within certain areas and the political separation of these great areas from each other.” This drift toward nationalism reached its climax at the time of the Reformation. The spirit of a larger unity, which earlier centuries had taken over from the Roman Empire, disappeared in great measure, but the longing for it and the need of it and the knowledge that it once existed and may be called to life again, find expression today in the organization of the League of Nations. How disastrous has been its displacement by the present intense nationalistic spirit is recognized on all sides. It would almost seem as if Philip Kerr, who had served as Confidential Secretary of Lloyd George at the Peace Conference in Paris, was thinking of the irreparable loss which Europe has suffered in this respect, when he said in his address at the Williamstown Conference in 1922: “What is the fundamental cause of war? I do not say the only cause of war, but the most active and constant cause. It is not race or religion or color or nationality or despotism, or progress, or any of the causes usually cited. It is the division of humanity into separate states. The