526 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



guide and sanction, distinct from religious duty or private 

 sympathies.&quot; And at the same time there arose the distinc 

 tion between breach of the sacred law and breach of the 

 secular law : &quot; the murderer came to be considered, first as 

 having sinned against the gods, next as having deeply injured 

 the society, and thus at once as requiring absolution and 

 deserving punishment.&quot; A kindred differentiation 



early occurred in Rome. Though, during the primitive 

 period, the head of the State, at once king and high priest, 

 and in his latter capacity dressed as a god, was thus the 

 mouth-piece of both sacred law and secular law ; yet, after 

 wards, with the separation of the ecclesiastical and political 

 authorities, carne a distinction between breaches of divine 

 ordinances and breaches of human ordinances. In the 

 words of Sir Henry Maine, there were &quot;laws punishing 

 sins. There were also laws punishing torts. The con 

 ception of offence against God produced the first class of 

 ordinances ; the conception of offence against one s neighbour 

 produced the second ; but the idea of offence against the State 

 or aggregate community did not at first produce a true 

 criminal jurisprudence.&quot; In explanation of the last statement 

 it should, however, be added that since, during the regal 

 period, according to Mommsen, &quot;judicial procedure took the 

 form of a public or a private process, according as the king 

 interposed of his own motion, or only when appealed to by 

 the injured party ;&quot; and since &quot; the former course was taken 

 only in cases which involved a breach of the public peace ;&quot; 

 it must be inferred that when kingship ceased, there survived 

 the distinction between transgression against the individual 

 and transgression against the State, though the mode of 

 dealing with this last had not, for a time, a definite 

 fc rm. Again, even among the Hebrews, more per 



sistently theocratic as their social system was, we see a con 

 siderable amount of this change, at the same time that we 

 are shown one of its causes. The Mishna contains many 

 detailed civil laws ; and these manifestly resulted from the 



