could have been met admirably by such an arrangement as we are advocating in Europe to-day: the maintenance of a small force by each nation for common action, under the direction of a supreme legal tribunal, against nations which would not obey the common law of peace. But we need not seriously discuss the influence of the Turk on the system. The last phases of the struggle, when the selfish nations and the ambitious Papacy spent their time in idle mutual recrimination and left the Hungarians and Poles to do all the work, justify us in dismissing that element. Kings and republics maintained armies for purely selfish purposes, for brutal aggression and defence against aggressors; and not a prelate in Europe had any moral repugnance to the system, or ventured to condemn it, especially as the Church used the same agency in defence of its own temporal interests.
With the development of the Papal power and the advance of the peoples of Europe the opportunity of peace became greater, but the spiritual authority pledged itself more and more deeply to the military system. The Popes aspired—as Gregory VII and Innocent III repeatedly state—to control the temporal as well as the spiritual affairs of Europe, to transfer crowns when they thought fit, to direct invasions and military expeditions against any who questioned their authority. Hildebrand boasts (Ep. vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal throne, he vehemently claimed that his
