s
established or consolidated was formed on the later model. Spain,
Naples, and the principalities founded on the ruins of municipal
freedom in Italy, were all under rulers whose sovereignty was
territorial. Few things, I may add, are more curious than the gradual
lapse of the _Venetians_ from one view to the other. At the
commencement of its foreign conquests, the republic regarded itself
as an antitype of the Roman commonwealth, governing a number of
subject provinces. Move a century onwards, and you find that it wishes
to be looked upon as a corporate sovereign, claiming the rights of a
feudal suzerain over its possessions in Italy and the AEgean.

During the period through which the popular ideas on the subject of
sovereignty were undergoing this remarkable change, the system which
stood in the place of what we now call International Law, was
heterogeneous in form and inconsistent in the principles to which it
appealed. Over so much of Europe as was comprised in the Romano-German
empire, the connection of the confederate states was regulated by the
complex and as yet incomplete mechanism of the Imperial constitution;
and, surprising as it may seem to us, it was a favourite notion of
German lawyers that the relations of commonwealths, whether inside or
outside the empire, ought to be regulated not by the _Jus Gentium_,
but by the pure Roman jurisprudence, of which Caesar was still the
centre. This doctrine was less confidently repudiated in the outlying
countries than we might have supposed antecedently; but,
substantially, through the rest of Europe feudal subordinations
furnished a substitute for a public law; and when those were
undetermined or ambiguous, there lay behind, in theory at least, a
supreme regulating force in the authority of the head of the Church.
It is certain, however, that both feudal and ecclesiastical influences
were rapidly decaying during the fifteenth, and even the fourteenth
century; and if we closely examine the current pretexts of wars, and
the avowed motives of alliances, it will be seen that, step by step
with the displacement of the old principles, the views afterwards
harmonised and consolidated by Ayala and Grotius were making
considerable progress, though it was silent and but slow. Whether the
fusion of all the sources of authority would ultimately have evolved a
system of international relations, and whether that system would have
exhibited material differences from the fabric of