all
at first, tends steadily to enlarge itself. The agents of legal
change, Fictions, Equity, and Legislation, are brought in turn to bear
on the primeval institutions, and at every point of the progress, a
greater number of personal rights and a larger amount of property are
removed from the domestic forum to the cognisance of the public
tribunals. The ordinances of the government obtain gradually the same
efficacy in private concerns as in matters of state, and are no longer
liable to be overridden by the behests of a despot enthroned by each
hearthstone. We have in the annals of Roman law a nearly complete
history of the crumbling away of an archaic system, and of the
formation of new institutions from the recombined materials,
institutions some of which descended unimpaired to the modern world,
while others, destroyed or corrupted by contact with barbarism in the
dark ages, had again to be recovered by mankind. When we leave this
jurisprudence at the epoch of its final reconstruction by Justinian,
few traces of archaism can be discovered in any part of it except in
the single article of the extensive powers still reserved to the
living Parent. Everywhere else principles of convenience, or of
symmetry, or of simplification--new principles at any rate--have
usurped the authority of the jejune considerations which satisfied the
conscience of ancient times. Everywhere a new morality has displaced
the canons of conduct and the reasons of acquiescence which were in
unison with the ancient usages, because in fact they were born of
them.

The movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in one
respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the
gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual
obligation in its place. The Individual is steadily substituted for
the Family, as the unit of which civil laws take account. The advance
has been accomplished at varying rates of celerity, and there are
societies not absolutely stationary in which the collapse of the
ancient organisation can only be perceived by careful study of the
phenomena they present. But, whatever its pace, the change has not
been subject to reaction or recoil, and apparent retardations will be
found to have been occasioned through the absorption of archaic ideas
and customs from some entirely foreign source. Nor is it difficult to
see what is the tie between man and man which replaces by degrees
those forms of recip