Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/599

 18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW d^ vanced so far as to have become, with some few exceptions,' substantially identical. The same may be said of Penal Law and the system of legal procedure. But in the Law of Fam- ily Relations and in that of Inheritance, a matter closely connected with family relations, the dissimilarities were stiU significant ; and we shall find this phenomenon reappearing in the history of English and Native Law in India. Two influences which I have not yet dwelt upon had been, during the second century, furthering the assimilation. One was the direct legislation of the Emperor which, scanty dur- ing the first age of the monarchy, had now become more copious, and most of which was intended to operate upon citizens and aliens alike. The other was the action of the Emperor as supreme judicial authority, sometimes in mat- ters brought directly before him for decision, more fre- quently as judge of appeals from inferior tribunals. He had a council called the Consistory which acted on his behalf, because, especially in the troublous times which began after the reign of Marcus Aurelius and presaged the ultimate dis- solution of the Empire, the sovereign was seldom able to pre- side in person. The judgements of the Consistory, being delivered in the Emperor's name as his, and having equal authority with statutes issued by him, must have done much to make law uniform in all the provinces and among all classes of subjects.^ III. The Establishment of One Law for the Empire Finally, in the beginning of the third century a. d., the decisive step was taken. The distinction between citizens and aliens vanished by the grant of full citizenship to all subjects of the Empire, a grant however which may have been, in the first instance, applied only to organized com- munities, and not also to the backward sections of the rural ' Such as the technical peculiarities of the Roman stipulatio, and the Greek syngraphe. "These decreta of the Emperor were reckoned among his Constitu- tiones (as to which see Essay XIV, p. 720 sno.)- There does not scm to have been any public record kept and published of them, but many of them would doubtless become diffused throueh the law schools and otherwise. The first regular collections of imperial constitutions known to us belong to a later time. f-V,^