Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/598

 584 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY with aliens {ius gentium), so that the product was a body of rules to be used by any civilized people, as being grounded in reason and utility, while at the same time both copious in quantity and refined in quality. This result had been reached about a. d. 150, by which time the laws of the several provinces had also been largely Romanized. Thus each body of law — if we may venture for this purpose to speak of provincial law as a whole — had been drawing nearer to the other. The old law of the city of Rome had been expanded and improved till it was fit to be applied to the provinces. The various laws of the various provinces had been constantly absorbing the law of the city in the enlarged and improved form latterly given to it. Thus when at last the time for a complete fusion ar- rived the differences between the two had been so much reduced that the fusion took place easily and naturally, with comparatively little disturbance of the state of things al- ready in existence. One sometimes finds on the southern side of the Alps two streams running in neighbouring valleys. One which has issued from a glacier slowly deposits as it flows over a rocky bed the white mud which it brought from its iay cradle. The other which rose from clear springs gradually gathers colouring matter as in its lower course it cuts through softer strata or through alluvium. When at last they meet, the glacier torrent has become so nearly clear that the tint of its waters is scarcely distinguishable from that of the originally bright but now slightly turbid affluent. Thus Roman and provincial law, starting from different points but pursuing a course in which their diversities were constantly reduced, would seem to have become so similar by the end of the second century a. d. that there were few marked divergences, so far as private civil rights and rem- edies were concerned, between the position of citizens and that of aliens. Here, however, let a difference be noted. The power of assimilation was more complete in some branches of law than it was in others ; and it was least complete in matters where old standing features of national character and feeling were present. In the Law of Property and Contract it had ad-