ROMAN LAW HISTORICAL SCIENCES 303 



French Revolution, the history of politics, whether in theory or in 

 practice, could not possibly be understood without some knowledge 

 of the Roman law and its effects. 



Ill 



That Economics are closely connected with both Politics and 

 Law is strikingly illustrated by the fact that The Wealth of Nations 

 was an expansion by Adam Smith of one third of a course of lectures, 

 the other two thirds of which dealt, first, with Public Jurisprudence, 

 and secondly, with Domestic Law. 1 Mr. Ruskin has expounded the 

 Political Economy of Art, but the Political Economy of Law is too 

 obvious to need pointing out. Roman law has, however, a special 

 value for the student of Economic History, because its records are 

 practically his only source of information for a most important 

 period. Professor Ramsay has explained the difficulty of investigat- 

 ing social and economic facts under the Empire. "Historians," he 

 says, "are so occupied with the great events, the satirists so busy 

 with the vices of upper-class society, the moralists with abstract 

 theorizing, the poets with Greek mythology, and with the mainten- 

 ance of their footing in the atria of the rich . . . that they have 

 neither time to write about the aims of imperial policy, nor eyes 

 to see them." "Here," he adds, "we must trust to our second class 

 of authorities, the inscriptions and the laws." 



No reader of the Digest can fail to have been struck with its wonder- 

 ful collection of little vignettes one might almost say snap-shots 

 illustrating social conditions under the Empire. We catch vivid 

 glimpses there of capitalists, tenant-farmers, artisans, slaves, freed- 

 men, and even children. We see them driving up the Clivus Capitoli- 

 nus or playing ball, as well as buying or selling or making their wills. 

 It is a great storehouse of social data, and we may be thankful 

 that the tough casing of the law has preserved them. Moreover 

 we now enjoy the light which of late years has been shed on them by 

 arch*ologists and epigraphists. Facts as to taxation, administration, 

 imperial and municipal finance, the conduct of shipping and other 

 industries, may all be found in that mine which Mommsen and 

 Marquardt have so brilliantly exploited. 8 But the value of the col- 

 lection to the economic historian may perhaps best be illustrated in 

 two instances, banking and the organization of labor. 



The Digest is full of information about bankers and banking. It 

 has been pointed out that the Roman Empire, especially after the 

 time of Caracalla, suffered from lack of means for accumulating 

 capital, owing to the scarcity of bullion and the insufficiency of 



1 Carman's edition of A. Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, &c., 1896. 



1 Ramsay, The Church and the Roman Empire, p. 184. 



3 See especially Marquardt, Rom. Staatsverwaltung , vol. i, pp. 165-268. 



