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.

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.

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.