Bryce on the Legal History of Rome and England

A COMPARISON OF THE HISTORY OF LEGAL DEVELOPMENT AT ROME AND IN ENGLAND1

By James Bryce2

IN the last preceding Essay the organs of legislation, and the methods whereby they were worked at Rome and in England respectively, were discussed and compared. A consideration of the course which legal change took, in its various phases of development, reform or decay, may be completed by inquiring into the general causes and forces which determined and guided the process of change. To justify the selection of Rome and England for comparison it is necessary to recur to two points only in which the history of institutions in these two States presents a remarkable analogy. Both have been singularly independent of outside influences in the development of their political character and their legal institutions. The only influence that seriously told on Rome was that of the Greeks: yet how thoroughly Roman all the institutions that ever had been Roman remained down till the second century of the Empire, after Hellenic influence had for more than two hundred years been playing freely and fully upon literature and thought! So English institutions have been far less affected by external influences than have been those of any other part of European Christendom. In France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, the traces of Roman dominion were never obliterated, and Roman law too, both through its traditions and through the writings which embody it, has always been a more potent factor than it ever was here. These countries have, moreover, borrowed more from each other than we have done from any one of them, except, perhaps, in the days when Normandy gave a Continental tinge to the immature feudality of England. And, secondly, both Rome and England have extended their institutions over vast territories lying beyond their own limits. Each has been a conquering and ruling power, and the process by which each grew into a World State from being, the one a City and the other a group of small but widely scattered rural tribes, offers striking points of resemblance as well as of contrast. I might add that there are similarities in the character of the two nations, similarities to which their success in conquering and ruling is due. But, for the moment, it is rather to law and institutions than to character that I seek to direct the reader’s attention.

Since the law of every country is the outcome and result of the economic and social conditions of that country as well as the expression of its intellectual capacity for dealing with these conditions, the causes which modify the law are usually to be sought in changes which have passed upon economic and social phenomena. When new relations between men arise, or when the old relations begin to pass into new forms, law is called in to adjust them. The part played by speculative theorists or scientific reformers who wish to see the law made more clear and rational is a relatively small factor in legal change, and one which operates only at rare moments. The process of development, if not wholly unconscious, is yet spontaneous and irregular. Alterations are made, not upon any general plan or scheme, but as and when the need for them becomes plain, or when it has at least become the interest of some ruling person or class to make them.

The relation of the general history, political, economic, and social, to changes in laws and institutions is best seen at certain definite epochs. It is indeed true that in nations which have reached a certain stage of civilization the conditions of life, and the relations of men and classes to one another, never remain quite the same from generation to generation. Every mechanical discovery, every foreign war or domestic insurrection, every accession or loss of territory, every religious or intellectual movement leaves things somewhat different from what it found them. Nevertheless, though the process of change is, except in savage or barbarous peoples, practically constant and uninterrupted, it becomes at certain particular moments much more swift and palpable, rushing, so to speak, through rapids and over cataracts instead of gliding on in a smooth and equable flow. These are the moments when a nation, or its ruler, perceives that the economic or social transformations which have been taking place require to be recognized and dealt with by corresponding changes in law and institutions, or when some political disturbance, or shifting of power from one class or group to another, supplies the occasion for giving effect to views or sentiments hitherto repressed. Accordingly it is profitable to give special attention to these transitional epochs, because it is in them that the relation between causes and consequences can be studied most easily and on the largest scale. Let us see what are the epochs in Roman and in English history which may be selected as those marked by conspicuous legal or institutional changes before we examine the relations of these changes to the forces which brought them about.

Five Chief Epochs of Legal Change at Rome

In the thousand years of Roman history that lie between the first authentic records of the constitution and laws of the city, say 451 bc, when the Decemviral Commission, which produced the laws of the Twelve Tables, was appointed, and 565 ad, when Justinian died, having completed his work of codification and new legislation,1 we may single out five such epochs.

1. The epoch of the Decemviral Legislation, when many of the old customs of the nation, which had been for the most part preserved by oral tradition, were written down, being no doubt modified in the process.

2. The days of the First and Second Punic Wars, when the growth of population and trade, the increase of the number of foreigners resident in Rome, and the conquest by Rome of territories outside Italy, began to induce the development of the Praetorship as an office for expanding and slowly remodelling the law.

3. The end of the Republic and early days of the Empire, when there was a brilliant development of juridical literature, when the opinions of selected jurists received legal authority from the Emperor’s commission, when the Senate was substituted for the popular assemblies as the organ of legislation, and when the administration of the provinces was resettled on a better basis—all these changes inducing a more rapid progress of legal reform.

4. The reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, when imperial legislation took a fresh and vigorous start, and when the triumph of Christianity brought a new, a powerful, and a widely pervasive force into the field of politics and legislation.

5. The reign of Justinian, when the plan of codification whose outlines Julius Caesar had conceived, and which Theodosius II had done something to carry out, was at last completed by the inclusion of the whole law of Rome in two books containing the pith of the then existing law, and when many sweeping reforms were effected by new legislation.

It is less easy to fix upon epochs of conspicuous change in English legal institutions and law, because English development has been on the whole more gradual, and because the territorial limits of the area affected by change have not expanded to anything like the same extent as did the territories that obeyed Rome. Rome was a City which grew to be the civilized world: the Urbs became Orbis Terrarum. The English were, and remain, a people inhabiting the southern part of an island, and beyond its limits they have expanded (except as respects Ireland), not by taking in new territories as parts of their State, but by planting semi-independent self-governing States which reproduce England.1 However, one may, for the sake of a comparison with Rome, take the five following epochs as those at which the process of change became the most swift and the most effective for destruction and creation.

II.

Five Epochs of Legal Change in England

1. The time of Henry II, when the King’s Courts became organized, and began to evolve a Common Law for the whole realm out of the mass of local customs.

2. The times of Edward I and Edward III, when the solidification of the kingdom saw the creation of a partly representative legislature, the enactment of important statutes, and the establishment of a vigorous organ for the development and amendment of the law in the Chancellorship.

3. The time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, when the progress of society and an ecclesiastical revolution caused the passing of several sweeping legal reforms, separated the courts and the law of England from a system of jurisprudence which had influenced it in common with the rest of Western Christendom, and permanently reduced the power of the clergy and of clerical ideas.

4. The epoch of the Great Civil War and Revolution, when legislative authority, hitherto shared or disputed by the Crown and the Houses of Parliament, passed definitely to the latter, and particularly to the popular branch of Parliament, and when (as a consequence) the relation of the Monarch to the landholding aristocracy, and that of the State to its subjects in religious matters, underwent profound alterations.

5. The reigns of William IV and Victoria, when the rapid growth of manufacturing industry, of trade, and of population, coupled with the influence as well of new ideas in the sphere of government as of advances made in economic and social science, has shaken men loose from many old traditions or prejudices, and has, while rendering much of the old law inapplicable, made a great deal of new legislation indispensable.

Now let us consider what are the forces, influences, or conditions which at all times and everywhere become the sources and determining causes of changes in laws and institutions, these latter being that framework which society constructs to meet its needs, whether administrative or economic or social.

Five such determining causes may be singled out as of special importance. They are these.

1. Political changes, whether they consist in a shifting of power as between the classes controlling the government of a country, or affect the structure of the governmental machinery itself, as for instance by the substitution of a monarch for an assembly or of an assembly for a monarch.

2. The increase of territory, whether as added to and incorporated in the pre-existing home of a nation or as constituting a subject dominion.

3. Changes in religion, whether they modify the working of the constitution of the country or involve the abolition of old laws and the enactment of new ones.

4. Economic changes, such as the increase of industrial production or the creation of better modes of communication, with the result of facilitating the exchange of commodities.

5. The progress of philosophic or scientific thought, whether as enouncing new principles which ultimately take shape in law, or as prompting efforts to make the law more logical, harmonious and compendious.

The influence of other nations might be added, as a sixth force, but as this usually acts through speculative thought, less frequently by directly creating institutions and laws, it may be deemed a form of No. 5.

The two last of these five sources of change, viz. commerce and speculative or scientific thought, are constantly, and therefore gradually at work, while the other three usually, though not invariably, operate suddenly and at definite moments. All have told powerfully both on Rome and on England. But as the relative importance of each varies from one country to another, so we shall discover that some have counted for more in the case of Rome, some in that of England. The differences throw an instructive light on the annals of the two nations.

III.

Outline of Legal Changes at Rome

The legal history of Rome begins with the law of the Twelve Tables. This remarkable code, which, it need hardly be said, was neither a code in the modern sense, nor in the main new law, but rather a concise and precise statement of the most important among the ancient customs of the people, dominated the whole of the republican period, and impressed a peculiar character upon the growth of Roman law from the beginning till the end of the thousand years we are regarding. It gave a sort of unity and centrality to that growth which we miss in many other countries, England included, for all Roman statutes bearing on private law were passed with reference to the Twelve Tables, nearly all commentaries grouped themselves round it, and when a new body of law that was neither statute nor commentary began to spring up, that new law was built up upon lines determined by the lines of the Twelve Tables, since the object was to supply what they lacked or to modify their enactments where these were too harsh or too narrow. Its language became a model for the form which later statutes received. It kept before the minds of jurists and reformers that ideal of a systematic and symmetrical structure which ultimately took shape in the work of Theodosius II and Justinian. Now the law of the Twelve Tables was primarily due to political discontent. The plebeians felt the hardship of being ruled by customs a knowledge of which was confined to the patrician caste, and of being thereby left at the mercy of the magistrate, himself a patrician, who could give his decision or exert his executive power at his absolute discretion, because when he declared himself to have the authority of the law, no one, outside the privileged caste he belonged to, could convict him of error. Accordingly the plebs demanded the creation of a commission to draft laws defining the powers of the Consuls, and this demand prevailed, after a long struggle, in the creation of the Decemvirs, who were appointed to draft a body of general law for the nation. This draft was enacted as a Statute, and became thenceforth, in the words of Livy,1 “the fountain of all public and private law.” Boys learnt it by heart down to the days of Cicero, and he, despite his admiration for things Greek, declares it to surpass the libraries of all the philosophers.2

For some generations there seem to have been comparatively few large changes in private law, except that declaration of the right of full civil intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, which the Twelve Tables had denied. But the knowledge of the days on which legal proceedings could properly be taken remained confined to the patricians for nearly a century and a half after the Decemvirs. The plebs had, however, been winning political equality, and three or four years after the time when the clerk Flavius revealed these pontifical secrets it was completed by the admission of the plebeians to the offices of pontiff and augur.

Meanwhile Rome was conquering Italy. The defeat of Pyrrhus in bc 275 marks the virtual completion of this process. A little later, the First Punic War gave her most of Sicily as well as Sardinia and Corsica, and these territories became provinces, administered by magistrates sent from Rome. She was thus launched on a policy of unlimited territorial expansion, and one of its first results was seen in two remarkable legal changes. The increase in the power and commerce of Rome, due to her conquests, had brought a large number of persons to the city, as residents or as sojourners, who were not citizens, and who therefore could not sue or be sued according to the forms of the law proper to Romans. It became necessary to provide for the litigation to which the disputes of these aliens (peregrini) with one another or with Romans gave rise, and accordingly a Magistrate (Praetor peregrinus) was appointed whose special function it became to deal with such disputes. He was a principal agent in building up by degrees a body of law and a system of procedure outside the old law of Rome, which received the name of Ius Gentium (the law of the nations) as being supposed to embody or be founded on the maxims and rules common to the different peoples who lived round Rome, or with whom she came in contact.1 Through the action of the older Urban Praetor much of this ius gentium found its way into the law administered to the citizens, in the way described in the last preceding Essay. Similarly the Proconsuls and Propraetors, who held their courts in the subject provinces, administered in those provinces, besides the pure Roman law applicable to citizens, a law which, though much of it consisted of the local laws and customs of the particular province, had, nevertheless, a Roman infusion, and was probably in part, like the ius gentium, generalized from the customs found operative among different peoples, and therefore deemed to represent general principles of justice fit to be universally applied. The Edicts which embodied the rules these magistrates applied became a source of law for the respective provinces.2

These remarkable changes, which may be said to belong to the period which begins with the outbreak of the First Punic War (bc 264), started Roman law on a new course and gave birth to a new set of institutions whereby new territories, ultimately extended to embrace the whole civilized world, were organized and ruled. It was through these changes that the law and the institutions of the Italian City became so moulded as to be capable not only of pervading and transforming the civilizations more ancient than her own, but of descending to and influencing the modern world. Now these changes, like those which marked the period of the Twelve Tables, had their origin in political events. In the former case it was internal discontent and unrest that were the motive forces, in the latter the growth of dominion and of trade, trade being the consequence, not so much of industrial development as of dominion. But in both cases—and this is generally true of the ancient world as compared with the modern—political causes play a relatively greater part than do causes either of an economic or an intellectual and speculative order.1

How much is to be set down to external influences? The Roman writers tell us of the sending out of a body of roving commissioners to examine the laws of Athens and other Greek cities to collect materials for the preparation of the Twelve Tables. So too the contact of Rome with the Greek republics of Southern Italy in the century before the Punic Wars must have affected the Roman mind and contributed to the ideas which took shape in the ius gentium. Nevertheless any one who studies the fragments of the Twelve Tables will find in them comparatively few and slight traces of any foreign influence; and one may say that both the substance of the Roman law and the methods of procedure it followed remain, down till the end of the Republic, so eminently national and un-Hellenic in their general character that we must assign a secondary part to the play of foreign ideas upon them.

The next epoch of marked transition is that when the Empire of Rome had swollen to embrace the whole of the West except Britain and Western Mauretania, and the whole of the known East except Parthia.2 It was the epoch when the Republican Constitution had broken down, not merely from internal commotions, but under the weight of a stupendous dominion, and it was also the epoch when the philosophies of Greece had made the Roman spirit cosmopolitan, and dissolved the intense national conservatism in legal matters which distinguished the older jurists. Here, therefore, two forces were at work. The one was political. It laid the foundations of new institutions, which ripened into the autocracy of the Empire. It substituted the Senate for the popular Assembly as the organ of legislation. It gave the head of the State the power of practically making law, which he exercised in the first instance partly as a magistrate, partly through the practice of issuing to selected jurists a commission to give answers under his authority.1 The other force was intellectual. It made the amendment of the law, in a liberal and philosophical sense, go forward with more boldness and speed than ever before, until the application of the new principles had removed the cumbrousness and harshness of the old system. But it should be remembered that this intellectual impulse drew much of its power from political causes, because the extension of the sway of Rome over many subject peoples had accustomed the Romans to other legal systems than their own, and had led them to create bodies of law in which three elements were blent—the purely Roman, the provincial, and those general rules and maxims of common-sense justice and utility which were deemed universally applicable, and formed a meeting-ground of the Roman and the provincial notions and usages. So here too it is political events that are the dominant and the determining factor in the development both of private law and of the imperial system of government, things destined to have a great future, not only in the form of concrete institutions adopted by the Church and by mediaeval monarchy, but also as the source of creative ideas which continued to rule men’s minds for many generations.

Nearly three centuries later we come to another epoch, when two forces coincide in effecting great changes in law and in administration. The storms that shook and seemed more than once on the point of shattering the fabric of the Empire from the time of Severus Alexander to that of Aurelian (ad 235 to 270), had shown the need for energetic measures to avert destruction; and the rise to power of men of exceptional capacity and vigour in the persons of Diocletian and Constantine enabled reforms to be effected which gave the imperial government a new lease of life, and made its character more purely despotic. Therewith came the stopping of the persecution of the Christians, and presently the recognition of their religion as that which the State favoured, and which it before long began to protect and control. The civil power admitted and supported the authority of the bishops, and when doctrinal controversies distracted the Church, the monarchs, beginning from Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, endeavoured to compose the differences of jarring sections.

These changes told upon the law as well as upon institutions. New authorities grew up within the Church, and these authorities, after long struggles, obtained coercive power. Not only was the spirit of legislation in such subjects as slavery and the family altered—marriage and divorce, for instance, began to be regarded with new eyes—but a fresh field for legislation was opened up in the regulation of various ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical matters, as well as in the encouragement or repression of certain religious opinions. The influence on law of Greek customs, which seemed to have been expunged by the extension of citizenship to all subjects a century before Constantine, makes itself felt in his legislation.

Besides these influences belonging to the sphere of politics and religion, economic causes, less conspicuous, but of grave moment, had also been at work in undermining the social basis of the State and inducing efforts to apply new legislative remedies. Slavery and the decline of agriculture, particularly in the Western half of the Empire, throughout which there seems to have been comparatively little manufacturing industry, had reduced the population and the prosperity of the middle classes, and had exhausted the source whence native armies could be drawn. Thus social conditions were changing. The growth of that species of serfdom which the Romans called colonatus belongs to this period. The financial strain on the government became more severe. New expedients had to be resorted to. All these phenomena, coupled with the more autocratic character which the central government of the Empire took from Diocletian onwards, induced a great and sometimes indeed a hasty and feverish exuberance of legislation, which was now effected solely by imperial ordinances.

Industrial decay seems to have been more rapid in Western than in the Eastern provinces, though palpable enough in such regions as Thrace and Greece. But everywhere there was an intellectual decline, which appeared not least in the sinking of the level of juristic ability and learning. The great race of jurists who adorned the first two and a half centuries of the Empire had long died out. We hear of no fertile legal minds, no law books of merit deserving to be remembered, during the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. The mass of law had however increased, and the judges and practising advocates were, except in the larger cities, less than ever capable of dealing with it. The substitution of Roman for provincial law effected by the Edict of the Emperor Antoninus Caracalla had introduced some confusion, especially in the Eastern provinces, where Greek or Oriental customs were deeply rooted, and did not readily give place to Roman rules. The emperors themselves deplore the ignorance of law among practitioners: and presently it was found necessary to prescribe an examination for advocates on their admission to the bar. Accordingly the necessity for collecting that which was binding law and for putting it into an accessible form became greater than ever. It had in earlier days been an ideal of perfection cherished by theorists; it was now an urgent practical need. It was not the bloom and splendour but the decadence of legal study and science that ushered in the era of codification. A century after the death of Constantine, the Emperor Theodosius II, grandson of Theodosius the Great, reigning at Constantinople from ad 408 to ad 450, issued a complete edition of the imperial constitutions in force, beginning from the time of Constantine, those of earlier Emperors having been already gathered into two collections (compiled by two eminent jurists) in current use. Shortly before a statute had been issued giving full binding authority to all the writings (except the notes of Paul and Ulpian upon Papinian) of five specially famous jurists of the classical age (Papinian, Paul, Gaius, Ulpian, Modestinus). The advisers of Theodosius II had intended to codify the whole law, including the ancient statutes and decrees of the Senate and Edicts of magistrates so far as they remained in force, as well as the writings of the jurists, but the difficulties were too great for them, and they contented themselves with a revised edition of the more recent imperial constitutions.

Justinian was more energetic, and his codification of the whole law of the Empire marks an epoch of supreme importance in the history not merely of Rome but of the civilized world, for it is possible that without it very little of the jurisprudence of antiquity would have been preserved to us, so that the new nations which were destined to emerge from the confusion of the Dark Ages might have lacked the foundation on which they have built up the law of the modern world. It is indeed an epoch which stands alone both in legal and in political history.

Justinian’s scheme for arranging and consolidating the law included a compilation of extracts from the writings of the jurists of the first three centuries of the Empire, together with a collection of such and so many of the Constitutions of the Emperors as were to be left in force, both collections being revised so as to bring the contents of each into accord and to harmonize the part of earlier date (viz. that which contained the extracts from the old jurists) with the later law as settled by imperial ordinances. It was completed in the space of six years only—too short a time for so great a work. It was followed by a good deal of fresh legislation, for the Emperor and his legal minister Tribonian, having had their appetite whetted, desired to amend the law in many further points and reduce it to a greater symmetry of form and perfection of substance. The Emperor moreover desired, for Tribonian was probably something of a Gallio in such matters, to give effect to his religious sentiments both by laying a heavy hand on heretics and by making the law more conformable to Christian ideas. Thus the time of Justinian is almost as significant for the changes made in the substance of the law as for the more compendious and convenient form into which the law was brought.

Some thirty years before the enactment of Justinian’s Codex and Digest (which, though intended for the whole Empire, did not come into force in such Western provinces as had already been lost) three collections of law had been made by three barbarian kings for the governance of their Roman subjects. These were the Edictum of Theodorich, King of the East Goths, published in ad 500, the Lex Romana Visigothorum, commonly called the Breviarium Alaricianum, published by Alarich II, King of the West Goths (settled in Aquitaine and Spain), in ad 506, a year before his overthrow by Clovis, and the Lex Romana Burgundionum, published by the Burgundian King Sigismund in the beginning of the sixth century. These three compilations, each of which consists of a certain number of imperial Constitutions, with extracts from a few jurists, ought to be considered in relation to Justinian’s work, partly because each of them did for a part of the Roman West what he did for the East, and, as it turned out, for Italy and Sicily also, when Belisarius reconquered those countries for him, and partly because they were due to the same need for accessible abridgements of the huge mass of confused and scattered law which prompted the action of Justinian himself. They are parts of the same movement, though they have far less importance than Justinian’s work, and, unlike his, include little or no new law.

The main cause of the tendency to consolidate the law and make it more accessible was the profusion with which Diocletian and his successors had used their legislative power, flooding the Empire with a mass of ordinances which few persons could procure or master, together with the decline of legal talent and learning, which made judges and advocates unable to comprehend, to appropriate and to apply the philosophical principles and fine distinctions stored up in the treatises of the old jurists. Here, therefore, political and intellectual conditions, conditions rather of decline than of progress, lay at the root of the phenomenon. But in the case of Justinian something must also be credited to the enlightened desire which he, or Tribonian for him, had conceived of removing the complexities, irregularities and discrepancies of the old law, bringing it nearer to what they thought substantial justice, and presenting it in concise and convenient form. Plato desired to see philosophy in the seat of power, and in Justinian philosophic theory had a chance such as it seldom gets of effecting permanently important changes by a few sweeping measures. Yet theory might have failed if it had not been reinforced by the vanity of an autocrat who desired to leave behind him an enduring monument.

This rapid survey has shown us that two forces were always operative on the development of Roman law—internal political changes and the influence of the surrounding countries. As Rome conquered and Romanized them, they compelled her institutions to transform themselves, and her law to expand. Economic conditions, speculative thought and religion had each and all of them a share in the course which reforms took, yet a subordinate share.

IV.

Outline of the Progress of Legal Changes in England

Let us now turn to England and see what have been the forces that have from time to time brought about and guided the march of legal change, and what have been the relations of that change to the general history of the country.

As with Rome we began at the moment when the ancient customs were first committed to writing and embodied in a comprehensive statute, so in England it is convenient to begin at the epoch when the establishment of the King’s Courts enabled the judges to set about creating out of the mass of local customs a body of precedents which gave to those customs definiteness, consistency and uniformity. Justice, fixed and unswerving justice, was in the earlier Middle Ages the chief need of the world, in England as in all mediaeval countries; and the anarchy of Stephen’s reign had disposed men to welcome a strong government, and to acquiesce in stretches of royal power that would otherwise have been distasteful. Henry II was a man of great force of character and untiring energy, nor was he wanting in the talent for selecting capable officials. He had to struggle, not only against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, but also against the pretensions of the churchmen, who claimed exemption from his jurisdiction, and maintained courts which were in some directions formidable rivals to his own. He prevailed in both contests, though it was not till long after that the victory was seen to have remained with the Crown. It was his fortune to live at a time when the study of law, revived in the schools of Italy, had made its way to England, where it was pursued with a zeal which soon told upon the practice of the Courts, sharpening men’s wits and providing for them an arsenal of legal weapons. It is true that the law taught at the Universities was the Roman law, and that the practitioners were almost entirely ecclesiastics. Now the barons, however jealous they might be of the Crown, were not less jealous of ecclesiastical encroachments and of the imperial law. They could not prevent judges from drawing on the treasures which the jurists of ancient Rome had accumulated, but they did prevent the Roman law from becoming recognized as authoritative; so that whatever it contributed to the law of England came in an English guise, and served rather to supplement than to supersede the old customs of the kingdom.

In this memorable epoch, which stamped upon the common law of England a character it has never lost, the impulse which the work of law-making received came primarily from the political circumstances of the time, that is, from the desire of the king to make his power as the receiver of taxes and the fountain of justice effective through his judges, and from the sense in all classes that the constant activity of the Courts in reducing the tangle of customs to order, no less than the occasional activity of the king when he enacted with the advice and consent of his Great Council statutes such as the Constitutions of Clarendon, was a beneficial activity, wholesome to the nation. But though political causes were the main forces at work, much must also be allowed to the influence of ideas, and particularly to the intellectual stimulus and the legal training which the study of Roman jurisprudence had given to the educated men who surrounded and worked for the king and the bishops.

The development of English institutions has been at all times so slow and so comparatively steady that it is not easy to fix upon particular epochs as those most conspicuously marked by change. However I take the epoch of Edward I and Edward III. Under Edward I, whose reign was one of comparative domestic tranquillity, the organ of government whose supreme legislative authority was to become unquestioned took its final shape in passing from a Great Council of magnates to an Assembly consisting of two Houses, in one of which the chief tenants of the Crown sat, while the other was composed of representatives of the minor tenants and of boroughs. Under his grandson the chief judicial Minister of the Crown began to sit as a Court, granting redress in the name of the Crown in cases or by methods which the preexisting Courts were unable or unwilling to deal with. Parliament passed under Edward I some statutes of the first magnitude, such as Quia Emptores and De Donis Conditionalibus, which impressed a peculiar character on the English land system, and introduced some valuable improvements in the sphere of private rights and remedies. But the legislature was, for two or three centuries, in the main content to leave the building up of the law to the old Common Law Courts and (in later days) to the Chancellor. The action of this last-named officer was, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of capital importance, so that the establishment of his jurisdiction is one of the landmarks of our legal history. It was really a renewal, two hundred years after Henry II’s time, of that king’s efforts to secure the due administration of justice through the realm, but it grew up naturally and spontaneously, with less of conscious purpose than Henry II had shown. Both the legislature and the Chancellor were the outcome of political causes, but it must not be forgotten that in the methods taken by the Chancellor (hardly reduced to a system till the seventeenth century) we find the working of a foreign influence which thereafter disappears from English law, that, namely, of the civil and canon laws of Rome and of the Roman Church, for the Chancellors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were all ecclesiastics and drew largely from Roman sources.

The days of the Reformation bring two new and powerful influences to bear upon laws and institutions. One of these influences is economic, the other religious. The growth of industry and trade had so far disintegrated the old structure of society and brought about new conditions that not a few new laws, among which the most familiar and significant are the Statute of Uses and the Statute of Wills, were now needed. The nation was passing out of the stiffness of a society based on landholding and recognizing serfdom into a larger and freer life. At the same time the religious revolution which severed it from Rome, which was accompanied by the dissolution of the monasteries, and which ended by securing the ascendency of a new body of theological ideas and of simpler forms of worship, involved many legal changes. The ecclesiastical courts were shorn of most of their powers, and the law they administered was cut off from the influences that had theretofore moulded and dominated it. The position of the clergy was altered. New provisions for the poor soon began to be called for. New tendencies, the result of a bolder spirit of inquiry, made themselves felt in legislation. One sees them stirring in the mind of Sir Thomas More. It was some time before the religious and economic changes took their full effect upon the law. But nearly all the remarkable developments that make the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth an epoch of legal change, may be traced not so much to politics as to the joint influence of commerce (including the growth of personal, as distinguished from real, property) and of theology. Even the oceanic power and territorial expansion of England, which began with the voyages of Drake and the foundation of the Virginia Company and of the East India Company, did not affect either the law or the institutions of the country. The establishment of distant settlements was largely the result of the growing force of commercial enterprise, in which there was at first very little of political ambition, though it cordially lent itself to a political antagonism first to Spain and then to France.

With the time of the Great Civil War we return to an era in which, though religion and commerce continue to be potent forces, the first place must again be assigned to political causes. The struggle which overthrew the old monarchy effected two things. It extinguished the claims of the Crown to a concurrent legislative or quasi-legislative power. The two Houses of Parliament were established as an engine for effecting legal changes, prompt in action and irresistible in strength.1 Towards this England had long been slowly tending, as during a century before Augustus Rome slowly tended to a monarchy. The work was completed at the Boyne and Aughrim, but the decisive blow was struck at Naseby. And, secondly, it occasioned the accomplishment of several broad and sweeping reforms in institutions as well as in law proper. A Parliamentary Union of England, Scotland and Ireland was effected which, though annulled by the Restoration, was a significant anticipation of what the following century was to bring. The old system of feudal tenure and the relics of feudal finance were abolished. New provisions were made, and old ones confirmed and extended, for the protection of the freedom of the subject in person and estate. Commercial transactions were regulated, perhaps embarrassed, by a famous enactment (the Statute of Frauds) regarding the evidence required to prove a contract. Such of these things as lay outside the purely political sphere were due partly to the development of industry and commerce, which had gone on apace during the reign of James I, and was resumed during the government of Cromwell and Charles II, partly to that sense which political revolutions bring with them, that the time has come for using the impulse of liberated forces to effect forthwith changes which had for a long time before been in the air. On a still larger scale, it was the Revolution and Empire in France that led to the remodelling of French institutions and the enactment of Napoleon’s Codes.2

As usually happens, an era of abnormal activity in recasting institutions and in amending the law was followed by one of comparative quiescence. It was not till the middle of the reign of George III that the beginnings of a new period of transition were apparent, not till after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the largest among the many reforms towards which men’s minds had been ripening were effected. These reforms, which have occupied the last sixty-seven years, have touched every branch of law. They include a great mitigation of the old severity of the criminal law and the introduction of provisions for repressing those new offences which are incident to what is called the progress of society. They have expunged the old technicalities of pleading by which justice was so often defeated. They have striven to simplify legal procedure, though they have not succeeded in cheapening it, and have fused the ancient Courts of Common Law with those of Equity. They have removed religious disqualifications on the holding of offices and the exercise of the suffrage. They have dealt with a long series of commercial problems, and have in particular made easy the creation of corporations for business and other purposes, given limited liability to their members, and laid down many regulations for their management. They have altered the law of the land, enlarging the powers of life owners, and rendering it easier to break entails. They have reorganized the fiscal system, simplified the customs duties, and established a tariff levied for revenue only. They have codified the law, mainly customary in its origin, relating to such topics as negotiable instruments, sale and partnership. They have created an immense body of administrative law, extending and regulating the powers of various branches of the central government, and, while remodelling municipal government, have created new systems of rural local government. As regards the central institutions of the country, several new departments of State have been called into being. Ecclesiastical property has been boldly handled, though not (except in Ireland) diverted to secular uses; a new Court of Appeal for causes coming from the extra-Britannic dominions of the Crown has been set up, and the electoral franchise has been repeatedly extended.

These immense changes have been due to three influences. The first was the general enlightment of mind due to the play of speculative thought upon practical questions which marked the end of last and the beginning of this century, and of which the most conspicuous apostles were Adam Smith in the sphere of economics and Jeremy Bentham in the sphere of legal reform. The second was the rapid extension of manufacturing industry and commerce, itself largely due to the progress of physical science, which has placed new resources at the command of man both for the production and for the transportation of commodities. The third influence was political, and was itself in large measure the result of the other two, for it was the combination of industrial growth with intellectual emancipation that produced the transfer of political power and democratization of institutions which went on from the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 to the Local Government Act of 1894. Could we imagine this industrial and intellectual development to have failed to work on political institutions as it in fact did work, it would hardly the less have told upon administration and upon private law, for the new needs would under any form of government, even under an oligarchy like that of George II’s time, have given birth to new measures fitted to deal with them. The legislation relating to Joint Stock Companies (beginning with the Winding-Up Acts), which filled so important a place in the English Statute-book from 1830 to 1862, and which still continues, though in a reduced stream, would under any political conditions have been required owing to the growth of commerce, the making of railways, the increased need for the provision of water, gas and drainage. And there went on, hand and hand with it, an equally needed development by the Courts of Equity of the law of partnership, of agency and of trusts, as applied to commercial undertakings. What the political changes actually did was to provide a powerful stimulus to reform, and an effective instrument for reform, while reducing that general distaste for novelties which had been so strong in the first half of the eighteenth century.

If we now review the general course of changes in institutions and law in the two States selected for comparison we shall be struck by two points of difference.

Some Differences between the Development of Roman and that of English Law

The branch of private law which is most intimately connected with the social and economic habits of a nation, and which, through social and economic habits, most affects its character, is that branch which touches Property, and the connexion of property with the Family. The particular form which the institutions relating to property, especially immovable property, take, tells upon the whole structure of society, especially in the earlier stages of national growth. The rules, for instance, which govern the power of an owner to dispose of his property during his life or by will, and those which determine the capacity of his wife and children to acquire for themselves by labour or through gift, and to claim a share in his estate at his decease if he dies intestate, or even against his last will—these rules touch the richer and middle classes in a community and affect their life. So one may perhaps say that the development of this branch of law comes nearer than any other to being the central line of legal development, bearing in mind that it is the needs and wishes of the richer and middle classes which guide the course of legal change. Here, however, we discover an interesting point of comparison between Roman and English legal history.

At Rome it is the history of the Family, especially as taken on its economic or pecuniary side, the most important part of which is the Law of Inheritance, that plays the largest part. The old rules, which held the Family together, and vested in the father the control of family property, were at first stringent. From the third century bc onwards they began to be modified, but they were so closely bound up with the ideas and habits of the people that they yielded very slowly, and it was not till the bold hand of Justinian swept away nearly all that remained of the ancient rules of succession, and put a plain and logical system in their place, that the process was complete.

In England, on the other hand, it is the Law of Land that is the most salient feature in the economico-legal system of the Middle Ages. Among the Teutons the Family had not been, within historic times at least, a group closely bound together as it was among the Italians, whereas the historical and political conditions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had in Western Europe made landholding the basis of nearly all social and economic relations. Hence the land customs then formed took a grip of the nation so tight that ages were needed to unloose it. The process may be said to have begun with a famous statute (Quia Emptores) in the reign of Edward I. Its slow advance was quickened in the seventeenth century by political revolution; and the Act of 1660 which abolished knight service recorded a great change. The peaceful revolution of 1832 gave birth to the series of statutes which from 1834 down to our own day have been reshaping the ancient land system, but reshaping it in a more piecemeal and perplexing fashion than that in which Justinian reformed the law of succession by the 118th and 127th Novels. Problems connected with landholding still remain in England, as they do in nearly all States, especially where population is dense; but they differ from the old problems, and though disputes relating to the taxation of land give trouble, and may give still more trouble, questions of tenure have lost the special importance which made them once so prominent in our legal history.

Both Rome and England have been, far beyond any other countries except Russia, expanding States. Rome the City became Rome the World-State. The Folk of the West Saxons went on growing till it brought first the other kingdoms of South Britain, Teutonic and Celtic, then the adjoining isles of Ireland and Man, then a large part of North America, then countless regions far away over the oceans under the headship of the descendants of Cerdic and Alfred. But in the case of Rome this expansion by conquest was the ruling factor in political and legal evolution, the determining influence by which institutions were transformed. In England, on the other hand, it is the relations of classes that have been the most active agency in inducing political change, and the successive additions of territory have exerted a secondary influence on institutions and an insignificant influence on law. Not only has English law been far less affected (save at the first two of the five epochs above described) by foreign law or foreign thought than Rome was, but the increase of England by the union, first of Scotland and then Ireland, and by the acquisition of transoceanic dominions, has not interrupted the purely insular or national development of English law. The conquest of Ireland, which began in the twelfth century but was not completed till the seventeenth, made no difference, because Ireland, always since the twelfth century far behind England in material progress and settled social order, received a separate civil administration with separate Courts. As these Courts administered English law, they followed in the path which England had already travelled and did not affect the progress of law in England. Nothing speaks more of the long-continued antagonism of the Teutonic and the Celtic elements in Ireland, and of the dominance of the Teutonic minority over the Celtic majority, than the practical identity of the common law in the two countries, and the total absence of any Celtic customs in that law. The few and comparatively slight differences which exist to-day between the law of England and that of Ireland are all due to statute. One is the absence of judicial divorce in Ireland, which an Act passed so recently as 1857 introduced in England. The second is to be found in the law relating to land, largely altered by statutes passed for Ireland by the British Parliament of our own time. The third is the existence in Ireland of what are admitted to be exceptional and supposed to be temporary penal provisions, the last of which is the Prevention of Crime Act of 1887. As regards Scotland, when her king became king of England, and when, a century later, her Parliament was united with that of England, she retained her own law intact. In some few respects her law, founded on that of Rome, and her system of judicial administration are better than those of England, nor has she failed to contribute distinguished figures to the English bench and bar; but, as she stands far below England in population and wealth, she has affected the law of the larger country as little as the attraction of the moon affects the solid crust of the Earth.

The vaster territorial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has told quite as little on the law of England as did the unions with Scotland and Ireland. When the English began to people what are now the self-governing colonies, and when India came under British sway, English law was too fully developed to be susceptible to influences from them, not to add that they were too distant to make any assimilation either desirable or possible. Had India lain no further from England than Sicily and the Greek cities lay from Rome, had she been as near the level of English civilization as those countries were to that of Roman civilization, and had she been conquered in the reign of Elizabeth instead of in the reign of George III, the history of English institutions and English law must have been wholly unlike what it has in fact been. These three differences measure the gulf which separates the course of English from that of Roman development.

Another salient point in which the two States may be compared relates to the smaller part which purely political as compared with economic and intellectual changes have played in the development of English laws and institutions. Although there is a sense in which every political change may be described as the result of an economic or intellectual change, or of both taken together, still it is true that at Rome the desire to grasp political power counted for more in the march of events than it has done in England.

Economic changes sometimes operate on politics by raising the material condition of the humbler class and thereby disposing and enabling them to claim a larger share of political power. This happened at Rome more frequently in the earlier than in the later days of the Republic. In England it has happened more in later times than it did in earlier. Sometimes, however, economic causes so depress the poor that their misery becomes acute or their envy intense, whence it befalls that they break out into revolt against the rich. This was on the point of happening more than once at Rome, but has been no serious danger in England since the days of Richard II. Sometimes, again, the growth of immense fortunes and the opportunities of gaining wealth through politics threaten the working of popular institutions. This occurred at Rome; and was one of the causes which brought the Republic to its death. It is a peril against which England has had, and may again have, to take precautions.

Changes in thought and belief operate on politics either by weakening the deferential and submissive habits of the classes which have been excluded from power so that they insist on having their fair share of it, or by implanting in the minds of the middle and upper classes new ideas which grow strong enough to make them insist on bringing old-fashioned practice into accord with new and more enlightened theory. It was the concurrence of these two forms of intellectual change that gave its specially destructive character to the French Revolution. Ideas of course act most quickly and powerfully when they are such as rouse emotion, for that which remains a mere intellectual concept or speculative opinion is not a thing to stir or to shake established institutions. The best illustration is to be found in religious beliefs. But the notion of Equality—that is to say, the notion that rights vested in every man as a man demand that every man shall be treated alike—has also proved an energetic explosive. Influences of this kind counted for little at Rome. Neither have they, except in the form of religious beliefs, or when their force coincided with that exerted by religious convictions, become the source of strife or constitutional change in England.

One may indeed say that the course of England’s political development has been less interrupted by convulsions than that of any other great State, for even the scars made by the Civil War were before long healed, so that hardly any of the old institutions perished, though some of them passed into new phases. The new buildings which popular government has within the present century added to the old edifice are built out of the same kind of stone, and (if one may venture to pursue the metaphor) weather to the same colour. So the growth of our law, both public and private, both criminal and civil, has been a gradual and quiet growth, due in the main to the steady increase in the magnitude and complexity of the industrial and commercial relations of life, which have made the law expand and improve at the bidding of practical needs. Where politics have affected the law, this has been through the rise of the humbler classes, a rise largely due to economic causes. So likewise the influence of ideas, of new views as to what law should be and how it should serve the community, has been marked by few sudden crises, and has been ruled by practical good sense rather than by aspirations after a theoretical perfection. As regards private law, this remark applies to the Romans also, although the constant strain placed upon their institutions by their territorial expansion as well as the differences between a City State and a large rural State exposed their political system to more frequent shocks and ultimately to a more radical transformation.

Finally, it may be observed that the interest felt in law, and the amount of intellectual effort given to its development, was probably greater among the educated class in Rome than it has ever been in any large section of the English people. Romans of intellectual tastes had fewer things to think about, fewer subjects to attract or to distract them, than the English have had. Law was closely interwoven with public life. Country life and country sports, commerce, religion, travel and adventure, covered less of the mental horizon than these pursuits have covered to Englishmen of the upper or educated class, so that more of thought and time was left to be devoted to law. Nor were many Romans carried off into other regions, like the Greeks, by the love of art, or of music, or of abstract speculation.

From this reflection another arises, viz. that legal and constitutional studies, as a subject for research and thought, find the competition of other subjects more severe in England to-day than they did in the eighteenth century.1 Historical inquiries, economic inquiries, and, to a still larger extent, inquiries in the realm of Nature, claim a far larger share in the interest of eager and active minds now than in the days of Hobbes or Locke or Bentham. They have done much to extrude law from the place it once held among subjects of interest to unprofessional persons. This is true all over the world; but legal topics, whether constitutional or belonging to the sphere of penal or administrative, or international or ordinary private law, seem now to claim even fewer votaries in England than they do in France or Germany, and certainly fewer than they do in the United States.

VI.

Observations on France and Germany

The sketch which I have sought to draw of the relations of general history to legal history might have been with advantage extended to include the legal history of other States, and particularly of two such important factors in modern civilization as France and Germany. But, apart from the undue length to which an essay would stretch if it tried to cover so large a field, there is a good reason why we may deem these two countries less well suited for the sort of comparative treatment here assayed. Neither of them has had the kind of independent and truly national legal development which belonged to Rome and belongs to England. Each of them started on its career with a body of pre-existing law, made elsewhere, viz. the Roman law which had come down to France and to Germany from antiquity. In Gaul, even in the parts most settled by the Franks, the law of the Empire held its ground, though everywhere largely modified by feudal land usages, and in the northern half of the country, when it had ceased to be Gaul and had become France, in the form of customs and not of written Roman texts. In Germany the old Teutonic customary law was by degrees (except as regards land rights) supplanted by the Corpus Iuris of Justinian, in conformity with the idea, fantastic as that idea now appears to us, which regarded the Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar down to Constantine the Sixth as the predecessors in title of the Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Thus neither the French nor the Germans built up on their own national foundation a law distinctively their own. Moreover, both Germany and France stand contrasted with England as well as with Rome in the fact that neither country ever had a true central legislature or central system of law courts comparable with the Parliament and King’s Courts of England. The German Diet, though enactments were occasionally made in it with its consent by the sovereign, enactments which however were not universally obeyed, dealt very little with law proper, even in the days of its greatest strength. Still less were the French States-General, even before their long eclipse, an effective legislature. Thus the development of the law of both Germany and France fell mainly into the hands of the jurists, qualified to some extent in Germany by the ordinances enacted by the electors, landgraves, and other princes, as well as by the free imperial cities, and (in later days) by the kings whose dominions formed part of the decaying Empire, and qualified in post-mediæval France by the ordinances of the king. In both countries it was upon the Roman law, as modified by custom, that the jurists worked, and hence in neither did a body of law grow up which was truly national, in the sense either of having a distinctive national quality or of embracing the whole nation or of having been enacted by a national legislature. The first complete unity given to law in France was given by Napoleon. His Code was based on the Roman law theretofore used, which had to a considerable extent been already codified under Lewis XIV; yet the creation of one Code for the whole country was a step so bold that it could hardly have been attempted except by an autocrat and on the morrow of a revolution. The first modern effort to give unity to law in Germany, itself an efflux of the aspiration for national unity, was made by the General Bills of Exchange Law (Wechselordnung) (1848-1850), while a general Commercial Code (Gemeines Handelsgesetzbuch) enacted in various States between 1862 and 1866 was reenacted for the new Empire in 1871. The fuller unity long desired was attained in 1900, when the new general Code for the whole German Empire came into force. This similarity between the legal history of France and that of Germany seems the more curious when one remembers that, so far as mere political unity is concerned, France attained that unity comparatively early, one may say at the end of the fifteenth century, while Germany continued down till the extinction of the old Empire in 1806 to go on losing what political unity she had possessed. It was not till 1866 that she began to regain it, though the Customs Union of the German States, formed in 1829, had been a presage of what was coming.

VII.

Private Law least affected by Political Changes or Direct Legislation

One phenomenon is common to the legal history in all these nations. That part of the law which has the greatest interest for the scientific student, and the greatest importance for the ordinary citizen, the private civil law of family and property, of contracts and torts, has been the part least affected either by political changes or by direct legislation. It has been evolved quietly, slowly and almost imperceptibly, first by popular custom, then by the labours of jurists and the practice of the Courts. Direct legislation by the supreme power has stepped in chiefly to settle controversies between conflicting authorities, or to expunge errors too firmly rooted for judges to rectify, or to embody existing usage in a definite and permanent form. In the sphere of private law, and even in that of criminal law (so far as not affected by politics), legislation scarcely ever creates any large new rule, and seldom even any minor rule which is absolutely new, not an enlargement of something which has gone before. Pure legislative novelties mostly turn out ill. Fortunately, the good sense of Englishmen, like that of Romans, has rarely permitted them to appear.

The parallel drawn between the history of Roman and that of English law is less instructive when we reach the later stages of that history. It cannot be made complete, not only because we know comparatively little of the inner condition and practical working of the Courts after the time of Constantine, but because there was after his time both a political and an intellectual decay, which few will profess to discover in the England of this century. The expansion and enrichment of the Roman system had stopped even before Constantine, while that of English Law is still proceeding.1 In England commerce is still growing, education is still advancing, new and complicated problems are still emerging, so that many forces continue to work for the development of law. Though we cannot foresee what lines this development will follow we may feel sure that some of the old causes of change are disappearing. The democratization of political institutions seems nearly complete, religious passions have grown cold, and all classes have been so fully admitted to a share in political power that any such bold reforms in central and local administration, in procedure, in penal law, and in one or two departments of private civil law as followed the Reform Bill of 1832, seem improbable. In some departments the possibilities of further progress appear to be exhausted, though there are others, such as those concerned with questions of the right of combination among employers or among workmen, and the character which motive imparts to acts in themselves lawful on which the last word is far from having been said.1 But there are at least two real difficulties which remain to be grappled with. One relates to the methods of legal proceedings. Their cost is so great as to deter many persons from the attempt to enforce just claims, to impose a heavy and unfair burden upon successful litigants, and to furnish opportunities for blackmail (especially in libel cases) to men who are equally devoid of money and of scruples. All efforts to cheapen them have so far failed. The other problem relates to a matter of substance. What are the general principles to be followed in empowering the State to regulate the conduct of individuals or groups of individuals, in permitting the central government or a local authority to compete with individuals in industrial enterprises and in restricting the power of combinations formed for commercial or industrial objects? This group of problems are being daily pressed to the front by political forces on the one hand and by industrial progress on the other. They are as urgent in the United States as in Britain. Nor are they matters for legislation only, for cases frequently arise which the best legislation cannot count upon having provided for, and which it needs not only technical skill but also a philosophic grasp of principles on the part of the bar and bench to conduct to a solution. The experience of the ancient world and that of the Middle Ages throws little light upon them. But as they have appeared simultaneously in many modern nations, each may have something to learn from the others. Comparative jurisprudence has no more interesting field than this: nor is there any task in labouring on which an enlightened mind may find a wider scope for the devotion of learning and thought to the service of the community.

I am tempted to venture on some other predictions as to the influences that may be expected to work on the legal changes of the coming century. But we have been pursuing an historical, not a speculative, inquiry, and it will be enough to suggest that industry and commerce, as quickened by the progress of physical science, are likely to be factors of increasing power, and that the purely political element in the development of law will count for less than that contributed by the effort to readjust social conditions and to give effect to social aspirations.

[1 ]The following essay forms the fifteenth in the author’s “Studies in History and Jurisprudence,” 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, American Branch), pp. 745-781.

[2 ]His British Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America. B. A. Oxford 1862, D. C. L. Oxford 1870; Fellow of Oriel College 1862; Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn 1867; Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, 1870-1893; LL. D. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Michigan, St. Andrews, Harvard; Pol. Sc. D. Buda-Pest; Litt. D. Victoria, Cambridge; D. C. L. Trinity (Toronto).

Other Publications: The Holy Roman Empire, 1862; Trade-Mark Law, 1877; The American Commonwealth, 1888; Impressions of South Africa, 1897; Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903.

[1 ]It is convenient to stop with Justinian, because he gave the law the shape in which it has influenced modern Europe, and because our historical data became much more scanty after his time. But of course the history of the law goes on to ad 1204, and in a sense even to ad 1453, in an unbroken stream, the codes issued by the later Emperors, and especially the Basilica of Leo the Philosopher, being based upon Justinian’s redaction.

[1 ]I do not include India or the Crown Colonies, because the population of these is not English.

[1 ]“Decem tabularum leges quae nunc quoque in hoc immenso aliarum super alias acervatarum legum cumulo fons omnis publici privatique est juris” (iii. 24).

[2 ]“Bibliothecas mehercule omnium philosophorum unus mihi videtur xii tabularum libellus, siquis legum fontes et capita viderit, et auctoritatis pondere et utilitatis ubertate superare” (De Orat. i. 44). An odd comparison, and one in which there is more of patriotism than of philosophy.

[1 ]As to the ius gentium see Essay XI, p. 570 sqq. [in the original volume].

[2 ]As to this see Essay II, pp. 77, 78 [in the original volume].

[1 ]Of course I do not mean to disparage the immense importance of economic causes always and everywhere, but in the ancient world, where communities were mostly small, they tended more quickly to engender political revolutions, and thus their action became involved with politics. In the modern world, where nations are mostly large and political change is usually more gradual, economic factors frequently tell upon society and affect the working of institutions without leading to civic strife. The more the world develops and settles down, and the further it moves away from its primitive conditions, the greater becomes the relative significance of the economic elements.

[2 ]“Parthos atque Britannos” are aptly coupled by Horace as the two peoples that remained outside the Empire.

[1 ]Described in the last preceding Essay, pp. 677, 678 [in the original volume].

[1 ]As Milton says:—

“And that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to strike once and strike no more.”

[2 ]Although the Napoleonic government was in many things only completing work begun under Lewis the Fourteenth.

[1 ]I owe this observation to my friend Mr. Dicey.

[1 ]Within two centuries after Justinian’s time official abridgements of his Corpus Iuris began to be issued, and it was virtually superseded in the end of the ninth century by the Basilica of the Emperor Leo the Philosopher. The action of his successors was largely directed to cutting down the old law into a shape better fitted for the changed conditions of the Empire, and the declining intelligence of the people.

[1 ]The interest excited by cases such as those of the Mogul Steamship Company v. Macgregor and Allen v. Flood illustrates this.