Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/190

170 that there was no deliverance for the poor debtor, and no humane or equitable consideration was shown towards him. It looked as if the law found a pleasure in presenting on all sides its sharpest spikes, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcibly obtruding on the bluntest understanding the tyrannic nature of the idea of right. The poetical form, and the genial symbolism, which so pleasingly prevail in the Germanic legal ordinances, were foreign to the Roman; in his law all was clear and precise, no symbol was employed, no institution was superfluous. It was not cruel; everything necessary was performed without tedious ceremony, even the punishment of death; that a free man could not be tortured was a primitive maxim of Roman law, to obtain which other peoples have had to struggle for thousands of years. But that law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was indeed national law—more terrible than roofs of lead and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich. But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of liberty and of subordination, of property and of rightful redress, reigned and still at the present day reign unadulterated and unmodified.