Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/371

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 357 teenth centuries has told quite as little on the law of England as did the unions with Scotland and Ireland. When the Eng- hsh began to people what are now the self-governing colonies, and when India came under British sway, English law was too fully developed to be susceptible to influences from them, not to add that they were too distant to make any assimilation either desirable or possible. Had India lain no further from England than Sicily and the Greek cities lay from Rome, had she been as near the level of English civilization as those coun- tries were to that of Roman civilization, and had she been conquered in the reign of Elizabeth instead of in the reign of George III, the history of Enghsh institutions and Eng- hsh law must have been wholly unlike what it has in fact been. These three differences measure the gulf which separates the course of English from that of Roman development. Another salient point in which the two States may be com- pared relates to the smaller part which purely political as compared with economic and intellectual changes have played in the development of English laws and institutions. Al- though there is a sense in which every political change may be described as the result of an economic or intellectual change, or of both taken together, still it is true that at Rome the desire to grasp political power counted for more in the march of events than it has done in England. Economic changes sometimes operate on politics by raising ithe material condition of the humbler class and thereby dis- I posing and enabling them to claim a larger share of political f power. This happened at Rome more frequently in the earlier than in the later days of the Republic. In England it has happened more in later times than it did in earlier. Some- times, however, economic causes so depress the poor that their misery becomes acute or their envy intense, whence it befalls that they break out into revolt against the rich. This was on the point of happening more than once at Rome, but has been no serious danger in England since the days of Richard II. Sometimes, again, the growth of immense for- tunes and the opportunities of gaining v/ealth through poli- tics threaten the working of popular institutions. This oc- curred at Rome; and was one of the causes which brought