Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/595

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 581 coming first, and courts being afterwards created to admin- ister law, it is really courts that come first, and that by their action build up law partly out of customs observed by the i people and partly out of their own notions of justice. This, which is generally true of all countries, is of course spe- cially true of countries where law is still imperfectly de- veloped, and of places where different classes of persons, not governed by the same legal rules, have to be dealt with. The Romans brought some experience to the task of crea- ting a judicial administration in the provinces, where both citizens and aliens had to be considered; for Rome herself had become, before she began to acquire territories outside Italy, a place of residence or resort for alien traders, so that as early as b. c. 247 she created a magistrate whose special function it became to handle suits between aliens, or in which one party was an alien. This magistrate built up, on the basis of mercantile usage, equity, and common sense, a body of rules fit to be applied between persons whose native law was not the same; and the method he followed would natu- rally form a precedent for the courts of the provincial gov- ernors. Doubtless the chief aim, as well as the recognized duty, of the governors was to disturb provincial usage as little as they well could. The temptations to which they were ex- posed, and to which they often succumbed, did not lie in the direction of revolutionizing local law in order to intro- duce either purely Roman doctrines or any artificial uni- formity.^ They would have made trouble for themselves had they attempted this. And why should they attempt it? The ambitious governors desired military fame. The bad ones wanted money. The better men, such as Cicero, and in later days Pliny, liked to be feted by the provincials and have statues erected to them by grateful cities. No one of these objects was to be attained by introducing legal reforms which theory might suggest to a philosophic statesman, but of law alike. Under him, says Cicero, the Sicilians " neque suas leges neque nostra senatus consulta neque communia iura tenueruntj*' /• Verr. 1. 4, 13.
 * One of the charges against Verres was that he disregarded all kinds