Page:Historical introduction to the private law of Rome (IA historicalintrod00muiriala).pdf/35

] that regulations were at once adopted which should apply to their public life as a united people, yet it is not only conceivable but probable that, as regarded the private relations of its members, each tribe continues for a time to accord a preference to its own ideas and traditions of right and law, and that the amalgamation was a gradual process, partly silent, partly due to regal or pontifical intervention. Just as there is little reason to believe in any nicely organised constitution down at least to the time of the Servian reforms, so is there little reason to believe in the existence of any very definite system of private law. Mixed races must, in minor matters at least, have made mixed customs and usages; and, though there is lack of material for establishing with certainty the coexistence of different systems among different branches of the population, yet it is difficult to resist the conviction that something at all events of the dualism so marked in many of Rome's early institutions may be accounted for by ethnical considerations.

There was part of the law of Rome that got the distinctive