y of an Imperial head had been admitted even in
bare theory, the labours of Grotius would have been idle. Nor is this
the only point of junction between modern public law and those views
of sovereignty of which I have endeavoured to describe the
development. I have said that there are entire departments of
international jurisprudence which consist of the Roman Law of
Property. What then is the inference? It is, that if there had been no
such change as I have described in the estimate of sovereignty--if
sovereignty had not been associated with the proprietorship of a
limited portion of the earth, had not, in other words, become
territorial--three parts of the Grotian theory would have been
incapable of application.

CHAPTER V

PRIMITIVE SOCIETY AND ANCIENT LAW

The necessity of submitting the subject of jurisprudence to scientific
treatment has never been entirely lost sight of in modern times, and
the essays which the consciousness of this necessity has produced have
proceeded from minds of very various calibre, but there is not much
presumption, I think, in asserting that what has hitherto stood in the
place of a science has for the most part been a set of guesses, those
very guesses of the Roman lawyers which were examined in the two
preceding chapters. A series of explicit statements, recognising and
adopting these conjectural theories of a natural state, and of a
system of principles congenial to it, has been continued with but
brief interruption from the days of their inventors to our own. They
appear in the annotations of the Glossators who founded modern
jurisprudence, and in the writings of the scholastic jurists who
succeeded them. They are visible in the dogmas of the canonists. They
are thrust into prominence by those civilians of marvellous erudition,
who flourished at the revival of ancient letters. Grotius and his
successors invested them not less with brilliancy and plausibility
than with practical importance. They may be read in the introductory
chapters of our own Blackstone, who has transcribed them textually
from Burlamaqui, and wherever the manuals published in the present day
for the guidance of the student or the practitioner begin with any
discussion of the first principles of law, it always resolves itself
into a restatement of the Roman hypothesis. It is however from the
disguises with which these conjectures sometimes clothe themselves,
quite as much as from their native form, that