Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/373

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 359 this has been through the rise of the humbler classes, a rise largely due to economic causes. So likewise the influence of ideas, of new views as to what law should be and how it should serve the community, has been marked by few sudden crises, and has been ruled by practical good sense rather than by aspirations after a theoretical perfection. As regards private law, this remark applies to the Romans also, although the constant strain placed upon their institutions by their territorial expansion as well as the differences be- tween a City State and a large rural State exposed their political system to more frequent shocks and ultimately to a more radical transformation. Finally, it may be observed that the interest felt in law, and the amount of intellectual effort given to its development, was probably greater among the educated class in Rome than it has ever been in any large section of the English people. Romans of intellectual tastes had fewer things to think about, fewer subjects to attract or to distract them, than the English have had. Law was closely interwoven with public hfe. Country life and country sports, commerce, religion, travel and adventure, covered less of the mental horizon than these pursuits have covered to Englishmen of the upper or educated class, so that more of thought and time was left to be devoted to law. Nor were many Romans carried off into other regions, like the Greeks, by the love of art, or of music, or of abstract speculation. From this reflection another arises, viz. that legal and constitutional studies, as a subject for research and thought, find the competition of other subjects more severe in Eng- land to-day than they did in the eighteenth century.^ His- torical inquiries, economic inquiries, and, to a still larger extent, inquiries in the realm of Nature, claim a far larger share in the interest of eager and active minds now than in the days of Hobbes or Locke or Bentham. They have done much to extrude law from the place it once held among subjects of interest to unprofessional persons. This is true all over the world ; but legal topics, whether constitutional or belonging to the sphere of penal or administrative, or in- y
 * I owe this observation to my friend Mr. Dicey.