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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



have adopted the gods of the conquered, and to 

 have transported them to their own city. In 

 later times they respected all the religions except 

 Judaism and Druidism, which assumed the form 

 of national resistance to the empire, and wor- 

 ships which they deemed immoral or anti-social, 

 and which had intruded themselves into Rome. 



Another grand step in the development of law 

 is the severance of the judicial power from the 

 legislative and the executive, which permits the 

 rise of jurists and of a regular legal profession. 

 This is a slow process. In the stationary East, 

 as a rule, the king has remained the supreme 

 judge. At Athens, the sovereign people delegated 

 its judicial powers to a large committee, but it 

 got no further ; and the judicial committee was 

 hardly more free from political passion, or more 

 competent to decide points of law, than the as- 

 sembly itself. In England the House of Lords 

 still, formally at least, retains judicial functions. 

 Acts of attainder were a yet more primitive as 

 well as more objectionable relic of the times in 

 which the sovereign power, whether king, assem- 

 bly, or the two combined, was ruler, legislator, 

 and judge, all in one. We shall not attempt here 

 to trace the process by which this momentous 

 separation of powers and functions was to a re- 

 markable extent accomplished in ancient Rome. 

 But we are pretty safe in saying that the precfor 

 peregrinus was an important figure in it, and that 

 it received a considerable impulse from the exi- 

 gencies of a jurisdiction between those who as 

 citizens came under the sovereign assembly and 

 the aliens or semi-aliens who did not. 



Whether the partial explanations of the mys- 

 tery of Roman greatness which we have here sug- 

 gested approve themselves to the reader's judg- 

 ment or not, it may at least be said for them that 

 they are vera causes, which is not the case with 

 the story of the foster-wolf, or anything derived 

 from it, any more than with the story of the 

 fateful apparitions of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. 



With regard to the public morality of the 

 Romans, and to their conduct and influence as 

 masters of the world, the language of historians 

 seems to us to leave something to be desired. 

 Mommsen's tone, whenever controverted ques- 

 tions connected with international morality and 

 the law of conquest arise, is affected by his Prus- 

 sianism ; it betokens the transition of the Ger- 

 man mind from the speculative and visionary to 

 the practical and even more than practical state ; 

 it is premonitory not only of the wars with Aus- 

 tria and France, but of a coming age in which 

 the forces of natural selection are again to oper- 



ate without the restraints imposed by religion, 

 and the heaviest fist is once more to make the law. 

 In the work of Ihne we sec a certain recoil from 

 Mommsen, and at the same time an occasional 

 inconsistency, and a want of stability in the prin- 

 ciple of judgment. Our standard ought not to 

 be positive but relative. It was the age of force 

 and conquest, not only with the Romans but with 

 all nations : hospes was hostis. A perfectly inde- 

 pendent development of Greeks, Romans, Etrus- 

 cans, Phoenicians, and all other nationalities, 

 might perhaps have been the best thing for hu- 

 manity ; but this was out of the question. In 

 that stage of the world's existence, contact was 

 war, and the end of war was conquest or destruc- 

 tion — the first of which was at all events prefer- 

 able to the second. What empire, then, can we 

 imagine which would have done less harm or 

 more good than the Romans? Greek intellect 

 showed its superiority in speculative politics as 

 in all other departments of speculation, but as a 

 practical politician the Greek was not self-con- 

 trolled or strong, and he would never have be- 

 stowed on the provinces of his empire local self- 

 government and municipal life; besides, the race, 

 though it included wonderful varieties in itself, 

 was, as a race, intensely tribal, and treated per- 

 sistently all other races as barbarians. It would 

 have deprived mankind of Roman law and poli- 

 tics, as well as of that vast extension of the Ro- 

 man asdileship which covered the world with pub- 

 lic works beneficent in themselves and equally so 

 as examples ; whereas the Raman had the great- 

 ness of soul to do homage to Greek intellect, and, 

 notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, pre- 

 served all that was of the highest value in Greek 

 civilization, better perhaps than it would have 

 been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of 

 the Greek decadence. As to a Semitic Empire, 

 whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians, 

 with their low, Semitic craft, their Moloch-wor- 

 ships, and their crucifixions — the very thought 

 fills us with horror ! It would have been a world- 

 wide tyranny of the strong-box, into which all 

 the products of civilization would have gone. 

 Parcere subjectis was the rule of Rome as well as 

 dcbellare superbos ; and, while all conquest is an 

 evil, the Roman was the most clement and the 

 least destructive of conquerors. This is true of 

 him on the whole, though he sometimes was 

 guilty of thoroughly primeval cruelty. He was 

 the great author of the laws of war as well as of 

 the laws of peace. That he not seldom, when 

 his own interest was concerned, put the mere let- 

 ter of the social law in place of justice, and that 



