are being driven to examine the means whereby codification was accomplished, and the results that followed it. They feel that for the execution of so great a work men are needed who have had something more than an empirical training, and are disposed to believe that in any systematic course of legal history and philosophy which might be devised to form the mind of the jurist as preliminary to his purely professional studies, a chief place should be assigned to the study of the Roman law. Thus, what with our own actual needs, what with the influence of the scientific spirit of the Continent, there has been awakened in England an interest in the Civil Law and an estimate of its worth which, although still matter rather of faith than of sight, is yet strong enough to give the University of Oxford not merely a motive for endeavour. ing to revive the study, but a reasonable hope that it may be revived with success, to the substantial benefit as well of the universities themselves as of the legal profession.

To prove that Roman law does deserve in England, and especially from the University, more attention than it now receives may well be thought, at least in Oxford, a spot which was long its home, a superfluous labour. That it fills so large a place in the world's history, that it is the fruit of so great an expenditure of human genius and industry, is of itself a sufficient reason why it should engage the labours of a learned body which has, in Bacon's words, taken all knowledge to be its province. I may therefore content myself with touching upon some of the purposes which the study may be made to serve, and indicating some of the directions in which it may most usefully be pursued; premising always that academical study has two objects, the furtherance of learning and discovery, and the preparation of young men to be, not merely useful and active in their future occupations, but also, in the widest sense of the word, good citizens. These two objects have been sometimes, Code for the Empire began to be prepared in 1872 and came into force in

1900.

under the names of Research and Education, opposed to one another, and no small controversy has been maintained touching their respective claims. Are they not in truth closely intertwined? since the greater the zeal wherewith a study is pursued, so much the greater is the teacher's influence on the taught; and since experience shows that when the work of education has been neglected by schools and universities, such neglect has not been caused by any absorption in abstract studies, but by mere dullness and self-indulgence, as fatal to study as they can be to education.

The various utilities of a knowledge of the Roman law fall into two classes: those which connect it with the liberal studies of a university, and specially with classical philology, with history, and with ethics; and those which belong rather to the faculty of law, and entitle it to a place in a strictly professional curriculum.

Taking the former of these heads first, there is no more obvious reason for pursuing the study than the light which it throws upon Roman history, which is, it can hardly be too often repeated, substantially the foundation of all modern European history. No people was ever so thoroughly permeated by legal ideas as were the Romans; none rated the dignity of the profession so high, spent so much pains in the elaboration of legal rules, and formed, let it be added, so worthy a conception of what law ought to be. Hence the whole political history of the Roman people and state is so involved with its legal institutions, that it can be understood only when regarded as derived from and conditioned by them. This is signally true not only of the regal and earlier republican period-in all early states of society, legal customs do for a people what a political constitution does in later times, or, in other words, public and private law are closely intertwined—it is true also of the republic in the days of Sulla and Julius Caesar, and of the long period of the Empire. Most of the constitutional arrangements of the Roman state depended upon those of private law, and many

of the gravest political questions turned upon legal doctrines. The subject of the Agrarian laws, for instance, is intimately involved with the legal conception of possession, as distinct from ownership, and can hardly be mastered without a knowledge of technical theory. The structure of the gens, the nature of the agnatic tie and of the patria potestas, the judicial character of the chief administrative magistrates, the doctrine of adop tion-all and each of them exerted a powerful influence on the political fortunes of Rome. Adoption, for instance, became from time to time under the Empire the means of working a system of appointment to the sovereign power, which could show the merits without the evils of hereditary succession. I forbear to dwell on the number of historical incidents, like that of Virginia and Appius Claudius, or of allusions in poetical and philosophical writers, such as those which every scholar remembers in Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, and most of all in Cicero, which only a knowledge of the civil law can elucidate. A student of the classics need not read the Corpus Juris merely for the sake of understanding these, any more than one is bound to read Coke or Hale for the sake of better seeing the point of the numerous legal phrases in Shakespeare. Few would go so far as the enthusiastic civilian who maintained that every divine ought to learn Roman law, because there are passages in the New Testament which a knowledge of it serves to explain. But, though every scholar need not, some scholars certainly ought; for there is much in the literature, and, indeed, in the literary spirit and feeling of the Romans, which is due to legal influences, and which can be fully apprehended and expounded by those only who have made themselves familiar with these influences in their source. In particular, such study is necessary in order to appreciate the character of the Empire in its relation to the peoples of the Mediterranean whom it embraced. Rome's great gift to the world was her jurisprudence; and the most interesting chapter in her history is that which traces, coincidently with the gradual extension of Roman

citizenship and Roman law to the subject races, the steady amelioration in its positive rules, and its development from a harsh and highly technical system into one grounded on principles of reason and justice, principles which are indeed common to all civilized peoples, but which the Roman jurists were the first to expound and apply. To this great work was devoted, from the time of Augustus onwards, nearly all the genius and labour, not of Rome merely but of the Roman world, which was not expended on abstract speculation; and it is more than an accident that long after the language of Virgil and Cicero had become debased in the hands of florid rhetoricians and soulless versifiers, its purity and its nervous precision were preserved in the hands of men like Papinian and Modestinus.

A second utility which may be claimed for our study, is its bearing upon the history of mediaeval and modern thought. When the Western Empire perished amidst the storms of the fifth century, its law did not perish with it, but remained a chief factor in European history, more widely, although less directly, influential. The barbarian conquerors, who brought with them only the rude customs by which they had lived in their native forests, soon felt the need of a regular legal system, and were glad to recognize that which they found subsisting. They allowed their subjects, the Latin-speaking provincials, to use it; in some countries they came to use it themselves; parts of it were collected and published in such compilations as the Breviarium of the West Gothic Alarich the Second and the Lex Romana Burgundionum. At the close of the Dark Ages, the study of the original texts revived, first in Italy, then in France, England, and Spain. Schools of law arose all over Europe. Immense pains were spent on the interpretation of the Digest, and it became thenceforth, for many generations, the foundation of the education and a principal part of the knowledge of every lawyer and publicist. As the mighty fabric of ecclesiastical power grew up, it created with the help of Roman materials its own

body of laws, varied of course by the nature of the subjects, and coloured by religious ideas, but substantially Roman after all. In this, as in so much else, the Papacy was, to use the forcible expression of Hobbes, 'the ghost of the old Empire, sitting on its tomb and ruling in its name.' And thus, in the hands of the very ecclesiastics who forbade its study, as hostile to their own pretensions and favourable to those of their antagonist, the Emperor, the doctrines of the Civil Law obtained a wider range than ever before. As its continued existence was one chief cause of the fantastic belief in the continued life of the Roman Empire, so that very belief became in turn the cause of its ultimate reception, in Germany, where it had not prevailed, no less than in Italy, where it had prevailed continuously, as effective and binding law. Being studied by all the educated men, the poets, the philosophers, the administrators of the Middle Ages, it worked itself by degrees into the thought of Christendom, losing the traces of its origin, as it became part of the common property of the world. A knowledge, therefore, of what it was, and of how it influenced mankind, helps to explain much which might otherwise have remained obscure in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissancemuch whose bearing a modern finds it hard to grasp, just because law holds a different place in his conceptions, and because he does not realize the power it exerted over untrained and uncritical minds. Theology is an instance, but by no means the only instance, of a branch of inquiry over which legal notions once exercised a sway they have now lost.

The Middle Ages had received from antiquity, besides the Scriptures, only three bodies of literature containing systematized thought--the Church Fathers, the philosophy of Aristotle, known through translations, and the Roman law. The last counted for less than the two former in moulding ideas. But it counted for a great deal.

The history of law and of the evolution of legal concep