precaution of the Roman
people against the revival of oppression, had consisted in obliging
every magistrate whose duties had any tendency to expand their sphere,
to publish, on commencing his year of office, an Edict or
proclamation, in which he declared the manner in which he intended to
administer his department. The Praetor fell under the rule with other
magistrates; but as it was necessarily impossible to construct each
year a separate system of principles, he seems to have regularly
republished his predecessor's Edict with such additions and changes as
the exigency of the moment or his own views of the law compelled him
to introduce. The Praetor's proclamation, thus lengthened by a new
portion every year, obtained the name of the Edictum Perpetuum, that
is, the _continuous_ or _unbroken_ edict. The immense length to which
it extended, together perhaps with some distaste for its necessarily
disorderly texture, caused the practice of increasing it to be stopped
in the year of Salvius Julianus, who occupied the magistracy in the
reign of the Emperor Hadrian. The edict of that Praetor embraced
therefore the whole body of equity jurisprudence, which it probably
disposed in new and symmetrical order, and the perpetual edict is
therefore often cited in Roman law merely as the Edict of Julianus.

Perhaps the first inquiry which occurs to an Englishman who considers
the peculiar mechanism of the Edict is, what were the limitations by
which these extensive powers of the Praetor were restrained? How was
authority so little definite reconciled with a settled condition of
society and of law? The answer can only be supplied by careful
observation of the conditions under which our own English law is
administered. The Praetor, it should be recollected, was a jurisconsult
himself, or a person entirely in the hands of advisers who were
jurisconsults, and it is probable that every Roman lawyer waited
impatiently for the time when he should fill or control the great
judicial magistracy. In the interval, his tastes, feelings,
prejudices, and degree of enlightenment were inevitably those of his
own order, and the qualifications which he ultimately brought to
office were those which he had acquired in the practice and study of
his profession. An English Chancellor goes through precisely the same
training, and carries to the woolsack the same qualifications. It is
certain when he assumes office that he will have, to some extent,
modifie