it. Looking back, however, to the period at
which the theory of the state of nature acquired the maximum of
political importance, there are few who will deny that it helped most
powerfully to bring about the grosser disappointments of which the
first French Revolution was fertile. It gave birth, or intense
stimulus, to the vices of mental habit all but universal at the time,
disdain of positive law, impatience of experience, and the preference
of _a priori_ to all other reasoning. In proportion too as this
philosophy fixes its grasp on minds which have thought less than
others and fortified themselves with smaller observation, its tendency
is to become distinctly anarchical. It is surprising to note how many
of the _Sophismes Anarchiques_ which Dumont published for Bentham, and
which embody Bentham's exposure of errors distinctively French, are
derived from the Roman hypothesis in its French transformation, and
are unintelligible unless referred to it. On this point too it is a
curious exercise to consult the _Moniteur_ during the principal eras
of the Revolution. The appeals to the Law and State of Nature become
thicker as the times grow darker. They are comparatively rare in the
Constituent Assembly; they are much more frequent in the Legislative;
in the Convention, amid the din of debate on conspiracy and war, they
are perpetual.

There is a single example which very strikingly illustrates the
effects of the theory of natural law on modern society, and indicates
how very far are those effects from being exhausted. There cannot, I
conceive, be any question that to the assumption of a Law Natural we
owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human beings. That
"all men are equal" is one of a large number of legal propositions
which, in progress of time, have become political. The Roman
jurisconsults of the Antonine era lay down that "omnes homines natura
aequales sunt," but in their eyes this is a strictly juridical axiom.
They intend to affirm that, under the hypothetical Law of Nature, and
in so far as positive law approximates to it, the arbitrary
distinctions which the Roman Civil Law maintained between classes of
persons cease to have a legal existence. The rule was one of
considerable importance to the Roman practitioner, who required to be
reminded that, wherever Roman jurisprudence was assumed to conform
itself exactly to the code of Nature, there was no difference in the
contemplation of the Roman tribu