Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/355

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 341 trade being the consequence, not so much of industrial devel- opment as of dominion. But in both cases — and this is gen- erally true of the ancient world as compared with the modern — political causes play a relatively greater part than do causes either of an economic or an intellectual and speculative order. ^ How much is to be set down to external influences? The Roman writers tell us of the sending out of a body of roving commissioners to examine the laws of Athens and other Greek cities to collect materials for the preparation of the Twelve Tables. So too the contact of Rome with the Greek republics of Southern Italy in the century before the Punic Wars must have affected the Roman mind and contributed to the ideas which took shape in the iiis gentvwm. Nevertheless any one who studies the fragments of the Twelve Tables will find in them comparatively few and slight traces of any foreign influence ; and one may say that both the substance of the Roman law and the methods of procedure it followed remain, down till the end of the Republic, so eminently national and un-Hellenic in their general character that we must assign a secondary part to the play of foreign ideas upon them. The next epoch of marked transition is that when the Empire of Rome had swollen to embrace the whole of the West except Britain and Western Mauretania, and the whole of the known East except Parthia.^ It was the epoch when the Republican Constitution had broken down, not merely from internal commotions, but under the weight of a stu- pendous dominion, and it was also the epoch when the philosophies of Greece had made the Roman spirit cosmo- politan, and dissolved the intense national conservatism in economic causes always and everywhere, but in the ancient world, where communities were mostly small, they tended more quickly to engender political revolutions, and thus their action became involved with politics. In the modern world, where nations are mostly large and political change is usually more gradual, economic factors fre- quently tell upon society and affect the working of institutions without leading to civic strife. The more the world develops and settles down, and the further it moves away from its primitive conditions, the greater becomes the relative significance of the economic elements. peoples that remained outside the Empire.
 * Of course I do not mean to disparage the immense importance of
 * " Partbos atque Britannos " are aptly coupled by Horace as the two