472 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



only as a geoj^raphcT and iis judge in a court in a secular matter ; nor 

 have we even to discuss his authority ; because he was, at least in this 

 case, a court of consensual jurisdiction. The popes could see, as 

 Grotius îiftcrwards saw, "such license of going to war as even barbarous 

 " nations may be ashamed of, that men take arms greedily for light 

 " causes, or none at all." No one at that time impugned their authority, 

 and why should they have recused themselves from an oiTico. or shirked 

 a duty, so clearly incumbent on them in their quality as head of the 

 Christian commonwealth ? 



The conception was, indeed, lofty and most Christian. The heart 

 of every earnest thinker must go forth in sympathy to the man who, 

 in the isolation of an autocratic throne, has, in these latter days, 

 dreamed such a dream as the institution of a court of supreme inter- 

 national appeal. Such a position the popes did in fact occupy at the 

 period of the discovery of America and, as is pointed out by Bryce,^ 

 " they were excellently fitted for it, by the respect which the sacredness 

 " of their oflBoe commanded ; by their control of the tremendous 

 " weapons of excommunication and interdict ; above all by their ex- 

 " emption from those narrowing influences of place, or blood or personal 

 "interest which it would be their chief est duty to resist in others." 

 For reasons beyond the scope of our argument this was soon to cease ; 

 but in A.D. 1493, Christendom was still conceived to be an organized 

 body of Christian states, of which the Pope was the spiritual head. 

 There was, therefore, an innate fitness in the lawyers and doctors of 

 the civil and canon law at the Curia Romana to deal with broad ques- 

 tions of natural and divine law or universal justice extending over inde- 

 pendent nations. The proceedings at Eome were, in matters of inter- 

 national interest, not arbitrary but formal and technical ; for there 

 were resident representatives there of all the powers of Christendinn. 

 During the period of their power tlie popes had often helped the weak 

 against the strong and had often strenuously laboured for that "truce 

 of God," which, even in present times, can alone avert the impending 

 Armageddon. We learn from 8ir Henry Maine* that Bentham was so 

 impressed with the confusion, attending the modern views of right to 

 territories by discovery and occupancy, that he went out of his way to 

 eulogize this very Bull of Pope Alexander; and Maine himself adds that, 

 although })raises of any act of papal authority may seem grotesque in 

 a writer like Bentham, "it may be doubted, whether the arrangement 

 " of Pope Alexander is absurder in principle than the rule of public 

 " law which gave half a continent to the monarch whose servants had 

 " fulfilled the conditions required by Roman jurisprudence for the ac- 



