Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/356

 342 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800*S legal matters which distinguished the older jurists. Here, therefore, two forces were at work. The one was political. It laid the foundations of new institutions, which ripened into the autocracy of the Empire. It substituted the Senate for the popular Assembly as the organ of legislation. It gave the head of the State the power of practically making law, which he exercised in the first instance partly as a magistrate, partly through the practice of issuing to selected jurists a commission to give answers under his authority.^ The other force was intellectual. It made the amendment of the law, in a liberal and philosophical sense, go forward with more bold- ness and speed than ever before, until the application of the new principles had removed the cumbrousness and harshness of the old system. But it should be remembered that this intellectual impulse drew much of its power from political causes, because the extension of the sway of Rome over many subject peoples had accustomed the Romans to other legal systems than their own, and had led them to create bodies of law in which three elements were blent — the purely Roman, the provincial, and those general rules and maxims of common-sense justice and utility which were deemed univer- sally applicable, and formed a meeting-ground of the Roman and the provincial notions and usages. So here too it is political events that are the dominant and the determining factor in the development both of private law and of the im- perial system of government, things destined to have a great future, not only in the form of concrete institutions adopted by the Church and by mediaeval monarchy, but also as the source of creative ideas which continued to rule men's minds for many generations. Nearly three centuries later we come to another epoch, when two forces coincide in effecting great changes in law and in administration. The storms that shook and seemed more than once on the point of shattering the fabric of the Empire from the time of Severus Alexander to that of Aurelian (a. d. 235 to 270), had shown the need for energetic measures to avert destruction ; and the rise to power of men of exceptional ca- Tolume].
 * Described in tiie last preceding Essay, pp. 677, 678 [in the original