The fundamental document for Diocletian's provincial re-organization is a list of the Dioceses and Provinces of the Roman Empire preserved in a MS. at Verona, which though printed by Maffei in 1742 escaped the notice of historians till Mommsen published it in 1862 in the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy, with a commentary in which he easily showed that it is the earliest provincial list we have, earlier than the lists of the Breviarium of Festus, of Polemius Silvius, of the Notitia Galliarum, and the Notitia Dignitatum. He attributed it to A.D. 297, and argued that it represented the new organization of Diocletian which he assumed to have been completed in that year. This conclusion, I believe, is wrong, though, like some other errors of Mommsen, it has been very generally accepted. He admitted, however, that strictly speaking the lower limit of the date of the List is A.D. 342 and the upper A.D. 297. For the present purpose it is enough to point this out; I hope to discuss the question fully in another place.

The fact is of course obvious that the normal unit of organised society in the area of the Graeco-Roman civilisation was the partly autonomous town. In very early times the towns in Italy were grouped in Leagues which were based generally on racial affinities; and the same was the case with the towns in the lands outside Italy which were earliest conquered by Rome. One of the commonest features of early alliances was the allowance of what the Romans called the “ius exilii” that is to say, each of the contracting parties agreed to give a harbourage to those citizens of its ally who were driven out by internal commotions. Exile was an exceedingly common incident of public life in the early days of an ancient town. It may be said that in primitive times party politics were not carried on by strife between two sections within the city walls. Rather one of the contending parties was within the walls, while the other was outside, anxious to force an entry and eject its opponents. It is probable that the ius exilii had a very considerable effect in early days in shifting population.

Dante, in his vision of Paradise, passes (Canto XXI) into the sphere of Saturn, over which the Thrones preside and where Love has an almost blinding splendour. The Thrones, in the Celestial Hierarchy described for the Middle Ages by the Pseudo-Dionysius, represented tranquillity, the peace which passes understanding, gained through contemplation of God and then interpreted to the world of men. There he sees the golden Jacob's Ladder of Contemplation, with many bright beings passing up and down, one of whom above the others reflected and revealed the brightness. The poet seeks to know why this special intensity and this nearness to humanity is given to one more than to others, and on asking finds that it is Peter Damiani, “Peter the Sinner” as he called himself in life and calls himself here. In his own age Peter was a striking and well-known character of many sides, but Dante's conception of him is strangely unlike that held by most of the modern writers. To some of them he seems the sternest of rigid reformers, to others the most eccentric of ascetics; to theologians he may be known as a learned and prolific writer who has found a secluded sanctuary in Migne's collection: to some historians he is a man who unaccountably influenced a curious age, to others he is the writer of an unblushing and unreadable account of clerical vice. But to Dante he stands for something very different; in the Seventh Sphere, the special home of contemplative saints, he is supreme. He is the type of the contemplative life which comes nearest to God and is therefore most useful to man. If we take this as the centre of Damiani's personality, all his activities and all his writings fall into their proper place. Instead of accidental denunciations of evils and corruptions, isolated comments on theological or clerical life, we have a coherent whole, a full expression of a well-ordered personality. If to most people he is merely an ascetic and a prophet of asceticism, he himself valued the ascetic life as a help to contemplation and as necessary to ensure its perfection.

It is now nearly one hundred and fifty years since the publication of the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of American Independence. The two events, closely associated in time, recall each other; for in his famous chapter on colonies Adam Smith predicted, with little apparent regret, the loss of the American colonies, and outlined the project of an empire which he thought could have been preserved and been worth preserving. That chapter, though it did not influence the course of the controversy which called it forth, nor, for a time, the colonial policy of Great Britain, has become, none the less, a landmark in the history of the British Empire. After Adam Smith had written, it was possible to think of colonies in a new way, though it was still not impossible to treat them in the old. The united empire of which he dreamed never became a fact, or even a political programme, but the ideas which he advanced bore their fruit in general opinion, and the spirit in which he wrote was in due course to animate a generation of colonial reformers and to bring forth a new and better colonial policy. Durham and his friends did not advocate Smith's imperial Parliament, the “States General of the British Empire,” and they did advocate imperial control of colonial trade, and not his “natural system of perfect liberty and justice”; but one may believe that the faith in the future of the British Empire which inspires the speeches of Molesworth and Buller, the Report on Canada and the Art of Colonization, owed some of its vitality to the courageous Utopia imagined in the Wealth of Nations.

The office of Marshal of the Eyre is the subject of at least two interesting cases reported in the Year Books of Edward II. As no account of this Marshalsy appears to exist it seemed worth while to bring together the following particulars, not only for their own sake, but as illustrating the history of a medieval serjeanty. These particulars fall under three heads: the origin and evolution of the office, its tenure and descent, and the functions and activities it involved.

The study of medieval Italian history in England has always tended to the picturesque in character. This is an old tradition; we see it already in Elizabethan plays; and may trace it through Byron and Browning to modern writers of biographies and histories of a time or of a city. Stodgily virtuous in Dennistoun, rhetorically philosophical in Symonds, stirring and graphic in Heywood, Clio has here had the opportunity to be a melodramatic muse, and has used it to the full. The moving accident has been almost all her theme, and she seems at times to have found in it the pleasure that Charles Lamb did in Restoration plays, the escape to the country “where no cold moral reigns.” This attitude is natural enough when we consider that Italian history comes to us in the light of the Renaissance and of Dante, of a time when personality in its most exuberant forms not only had free play in life, but full record, and record which is living literature and not a mere “source.”

From the confessionals “we” hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies.

Foreign policy is an extremely elastic term. It may mean a great deal or very little: it may embrace the most vital interests of the world at large—humanity's very right to live and prosper—if it be the Foreign Policy of a World Power like the British Empire; or it may merely concern the interests of a particular country from a certain angle, that is to say, in so far as such interests may conflict with those of another nation or nations. These two aspects of Foreign Policy, the world and the regional, were clearly distinguished and defined after the Great War, when at the Conference which culminated in the Versailles Treaty the nations were classified as countries with world interests and countries with limited interests. It was, furthermore, given juridical expression in the composition of the Council of the League of Nations, in which World Powers were given permanent seats and the other members of the League were assigned an equal number of elective seats which they were to occupy for a limited period of time.

The generally successful result of our naval wars may be ascribed largely to the advancement of experienced seamen to high office at the Admiralty. Since the period of the Dutch Wars this practice has prevailed more here than among our rivals, the outcome being the accumulation of a body of naval doctrine which has proved to be invaluable at crises such as arose in and after 1793. On the other hand the Revolution in France bore hard on her marine, leading to the emigration of most of the officers, and to the infiltration of doctrinaire views, derived from the land campaigns of 1793. Such, in brief, were the conditions amidst which the young Bonaparte came into contact with the Mediterranean campaign of that year.

Anotion seems to be gaining currency that the methods of diplomacy as now pursued differ in some way from those of what may be called the Victorian period. It has perhaps arisen from the first of President Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, as constituting the only possible programme for giving peace to the world, set forth in these words: “Open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international undertakings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” The Fourteen Points were accepted by both Germany and the Allies and Associated Powers of the Entente as “the necessary terms of such an armistice as would fully protect the interest of the peoples involved and ensure to the associated Governments the unrestricted power to safeguard and enforce the details of the peace to which the German Government had agreed”. And it has been rather hastily assumed that this agreement had put an end to the secret diplomacy which hitherto had distorted the policy of the European Allies. A paper read by Sir Maurice Hankey before the British Institute of International Affairs on November 2, 1920, confirmed the view that diplomacy by conference between the principal Ministers of the Powers concerned has to an important extent superseded the old way of conducting international relations through professional diplomatists accredited by the governments concerned, and that this change was brought about by the World War.

The question of the publicity of State Papers obviously has two aspects. Certain transactions of diplomacy can never be made known immediately. Personal comments and attacks creep occasionally into dispatches and have to be cut out on publication. But these omissions, though interesting, are unimportant except to the historian. Certain other and more important transactions have to be concealed altogether, because a confidence would be betrayed, or too much be made of a tentative or false step in diplomatic transactions. Even in such cases, however, there is usually no objection to revealing the reasons that led to the conclusion finally adopted. So much can be done in a completed negotiation or decision. But most diplomats would agree that it is sometimes dangerous to publish details as to abortive negotiations. It is very often necessary to do so, but the announcement of the failure of a negotiation, if accompanied by clouds of papers, is not likely to produce a good impression and may sometimes prevent a remedy from being found.

At an early period it was seen to be necessary that the observation of treaties should be ensured by the adoption of various sanctions besides the signatures of the high contracting parties.

A probably complete list of the expedients employed for the confirmation and execution of treaties up to, say, the end of the sixteenth century would include the following:

An oath taken by the high contracting parties, as well as by their plenipotentiaries and other persons of importance.

Though historians are still waiting for Holstein's papers, enough material has accumulated since his death in 1909 to attempt a sketch of the man who had the largest share in the control of German foreign policy from the fall of Bismarck in 1890 till his own retirement in 1906. During his lifetime his name was scarcely known even to his countrymen; but the Memoirs of his colleagues Otto Hammann and Baron von Eckardstein, to mention only the two principal witnesses, have thrown a flood of light on the Éminence Grise of modern Germany, who, like Père Joseph, loved to work in the dark and preferred the reality to the pomp of power.

The following letters (which are selected from the forthcoming Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell, and supplement the documents published by Spencer Walpole) take us behind the scenes of the Melbourne Cabinet during the anxious months of 1840, when the competition of Great Britain and France for hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean enlarged the struggle of Mehemet Ali and the Sultan from a local into a European problem, and brought the two countries within sight of war. The duel between Palmerston and Thiers was watched with an anxiety which was fully shared by the colleagues of the masterful Foreign Secretary. Lord Holland led the opposition within the Cabinet, and was vigorously supported by Lord Clarendon. Lord Spencer and Lord Lansdowne were also uneasy; and their apprehensions were shared by the Prime Minister who, however, was painfully aware that the resignation of Palmerston would destroy a ministry which had long outlived its popularity.

The Indian administration of the eighth Earl of Elgin is important and interesting for two reasons. It furnishes a perfect cross-section made in the government of India at the time when the old Company methods were being rapidly superseded by those of the new régime: and it reveals the judgments passed on that government by a widely experienced administrator of the day.