Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/233

VII Let us turn for a moment, before we leave these earlier stages of Roman progress, to another aspect of Rome's development as a City-State, which has been of much greater interest to the world than even the growth of her constitution. The genius of the Roman people was to leave one valuable legacy to modern civilisation; but it was not to be the memory of a gifted democracy, like the Athenian, the nursing mother of poets, orators, sculptors, and philosophers. It was to be a legacy of legal ideas and practice; a systematisation of the rights and duties of men to each other and to the State, and of the procedure and the sanctions necessary to secure them, which preserved the conceptions of legal justice and equity throughout all the chaos and confusion of the Middle Ages. Though hard to realise, and especially so for Englishmen, it is true that modern Europe owes to the Romans its ancient inherited sense of the sacredness of a free man's person and property, and its knowledge of the simplest and most rational methods by which person and property may be secured with least inconvenience to the whole community. The nations to come after Rome were saved the trouble of finding out all this for themselves; and it may be doubted whether any of them had the requisite genius. We in England, for example, owe the peculiar cumbrousness of our legal system to the absence of those direct Roman influences, which, on the continent, have simplified and illuminated the native legal material.

The beginnings of Roman law are to be found in the period we have just been traversing; here began