nial to it, had to spring
up--before two of the chiefest postulates of International Law could
be universally conceded.

It is a consideration well worthy to be kept in view, that during a
large part of what we usually term modern history no such conception
was entertained as that of "_territorial sovereignty_." Sovereignty
was not associated with dominion over a portion or subdivision of the
earth. The world had lain for so many centuries under the shadow of
Imperial Rome as to have forgotten that distribution of the vast
spaces comprised in the empire which had once parcelled them out into
a number of independent commonwealths, claiming immunity from
extrinsic interference, and pretending to equality of national rights.
After the subsidence of the barbarian irruptions, the notion of
sovereignty that prevailed seems to have been twofold. On the one hand
it assumed the form of what may be called "_tribe_-sovereignty." The
Franks, the Burgundians, the Vandals, the Lombards, and Visigoths were
masters, of course, of the territories which they occupied, and to
which some of them have given a geographical appellation; but they
based no claim of right upon the fact of territorial possession, and
indeed attached no importance to it whatever. They appear to have
retained the traditions which they brought with them from the forest
and the steppe, and to have still been in their own view a patriarchal
society, a nomad horde, merely encamped for the time upon the soil
which afforded them sustenance. Part of Transalpine Gaul, with part of
Germany, had now become the country _de facto_ occupied by the
Franks--it was France; but the Merovingian line of chieftains, the
descendants of Clovis, were not Kings of France, they were Kings of
the Franks. The alternative to this peculiar notion of sovereignty
appears to have been--and this is the important point--the idea of
universal dominion. The moment a monarch departed from the special
relation of chief to clansmen, and became solicitous, for purposes of
his own, to invest himself with a novel form of sovereignty, the only
precedent which suggested itself for his adoption was the domination
of the Emperors of Rome. To parody a common quotation, he became "_aut
Caesar aut nullus_." Either he pretended to the full prerogative of the
Byzantine Emperor, or he had no political status whatever. In our own
age, when a new dynasty is desirous of obliterating the prescriptive
title of a deposed