Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/592

 578 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY those of Thrace, Transalpine Gaul, Spain, and Britain, were in a lower stage of social organization, and possessed, when they were conquered, not so much regular laws as tribal usages, suited to their rude inhabitants. In the former set of cases not much new law was needed. In the latter set the native customs could not meet the needs of communities which soon began to advance in wealth and culture under Roman rule, so law had to be created. There were also in all these provinces two classes of in- habitants. One consisted of those who enjoyed Roman citi- zenship, not merely men of Italian birth settled there but also men to whom citizenship had been granted (as for in- stance when they retired from military service), or the natives of cities on which (as to Tarsus in Cilicia, St. Paul's birthplace) citizenship had been conferred as a boon.^ This was a large class, and went on rapidly increasing. To it pure Roman law was applicable, subject of course to any local customs. The other class consisted of the provincial subjects who were merely subjects, and, in the view of the Roman law, aliens {peregrini). They had their own laws or tribal cus- toms, and to them Roman law was primarily inapplicable, not only because it was novel and unfamiliar, so strange to their habits that it would have been unjust as well as prac- tically inconvenient to have applied it to them, but also be- cause the Romans, like the other civilized communities of antiquity, had been so much accustomed to consider private legal rights as necessarily connected with membership of a city community that it would have seemed unnatural to apply the private law of one city community to the citizens of an- other. It is true that the Romans after a time disabused their minds of this notion, as indeed they had from a com- instance. Though not a complete code, they cover large parts of the field of law. ' When I speak of citizenship, it is not necessarily or generally polit- ical citizenship that is to be understood, but the citizenship which carried with it private civil rights (those rights which the Romans call connuhmm, and commercium,) including Roman family and inheritance law and Roman contract and property law. Not only the civilized Spaniards but the bulk of the upper class in Greece seem to have become citizens by the time of the Antonines.