undue influence of our
own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air
we breathe. It requires all historic forces to produce their
record and submit to judgment, and it promotes the faculty of
resistance to contemporary surroundings by familiarity with other
ages and other orbits of thought.

In these latter days the sum of differences in international
character has been appreciably bound down by the constant process
of adaptation and adjustment, and by exposure to like influences.
The people of various countries are swayed by identical
interests, they are absorbed in the same problems, and thrill
with the same emotions; their classics are interchangeable,
authorities in science are nearly alike for all, and they readily
combine to make experiments and researches in common. Towards
1500, European nations, having been fashioned and composed out of
simple elements during the thousand years between the fall of the
Roman Empire and that of its successor is the East, had reached
full measure of differentiation. They were estranged from each
other, and were inclined to treat the foreigner as the foe.
Ancient links were loosened, the Pope was no longer an accepted
peacemaker; and the idea of an international code, overriding the
will of nations and the authority of sovereigns, had not dawned
upon philosophy. Between the old order that was changing and the
new that was unborn, Europe had an inorganic interval to go
through.

Modern History begins under stress of the Ottoman Conquest.
Constantinople fell, after an attempt to negotiate for help, by
the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. The agreement come to
at Florence was not ratified at home; the attempt was resented,
and led to an explosion of feeling that made even subjugation by
the Turk seem for the moment less intolerable, and that hastened
the catastrophe by making Western Christians slow to sacrifice
themselves for their implacable brethren in the East. Offers of
help were made, conditional on acceptance of the Florentine
decree, and were rejected with patriotic and theological disdain.
A small force of papal and Genoese mercenaries shared the fate of
the defenders, and the end could not have been long averted, even
by the restoration of religious unity. The Powers that held back
were not restrained by dogmatic arguments only. The dread of Latin
intolerance was the most favourable circumstance encountered by the
Turks in the Eastern E