we gain an adequate idea
of the subtlety with which they mix themselves in human thought. The
Lockeian theory of the origin of Law in a Social Compact scarcely
conceals its Roman derivation, and indeed is only the dress by which
the ancient views were rendered more attractive to a particular
generation of the moderns; but on the other hand the theory of Hobbes
on the same subject was purposely devised to repudiate the reality of
a law of nature as conceived by the Romans and their disciples. Yet
these two theories, which long divided the reflecting politicians of
England into hostile camps, resemble each other strictly in their
fundamental assumption of a non-historic, unverifiable, condition of
the race. Their authors differed as to the characteristics of the
prae-social state, and as to the nature of the abnormal action by which
men lifted themselves out of it into that social organisation with
which alone we are acquainted, but they agreed in thinking that a
great chasm separated man in his primitive condition from man in
society, and this notion we cannot doubt that they borrowed,
consciously or unconsciously, from the Romans. If indeed the phenomena
of law be regarded in the way in which these theorists regarded
them--that is, as one vast complex whole--it is not surprising that
the mind should often evade the task it has set to itself by falling
back on some ingenious conjecture which (plausibly interpreted) will
seem to reconcile everything, or else that it should sometimes abjure
in despair the labour of systematization.

From the theories of jurisprudence which have the same speculative
basis as the Roman doctrine two of much celebrity must be excepted.
The first of them is that associated with the great name of
Montesquieu. Though there are some ambiguous expressions in the early
part of the _Esprit des Lois_, which seem to show its writer's
unwillingness to break quite openly with the views hitherto popular,
the general drift of the book is certainly to indicate a very
different conception of its subject from any which had been
entertained before. It has often been noticed that, amidst the vast
variety of examples which, in its immense width of survey, it sweeps
together from supposed systems of jurisprudence, there is an evident
anxiety to thrust into especial prominence those manners and
institutions which astonish the civilised reader by their uncouthness,
strangeness, or indecency. The inference constant