ld as to disclose very
serious misconceptions of the principles of legal history. The Law of
the Twelve Tables is to be explained by the character of the age in
which it was enacted. It does not license a tendency which a later era
thought itself bound to counteract, but it proceeds on the assumption
that no such tendency exists, or, perhaps we should say, in ignorance
of the possibility of its existence. There is no likelihood that Roman
citizens began immediately to avail themselves freely of the power to
disinherit. It is against all reason and sound appreciation of history
to suppose that the yoke of family bondage, still patiently submitted
to, as we know, where its pressure galled most cruelly, would be cast
off in the very particular in which its incidence in our own day is
not otherwise than welcome. The Law of the Twelve Tables permitted the
execution of Testaments in the only case in which it was thought
possible that they could be executed, viz. on failure of children and
proximate kindred. It did not forbid the disinherison of direct
descendants, inasmuch as it did not legislate against a contingency
which no Roman lawgiver of that era could have contemplated. No doubt,
as the offices of family affection progressively lost the aspect of
primary personal duties, the disinherison of children was occasionally
attempted. But the interference of the Praetor, so far from being
called for by the universality of the abuse, was doubtless first
prompted by the fact that such instances of unnatural caprice were few
and exceptional, and at conflict with the current morality.

The indications furnished by this part of Roman Testamentary Law are
of a very different kind. It is remarkable that a Will never seems to
have been regarded by the Romans as a means of _disinheriting_ a
Family, or of effecting the unequal distribution of a patrimony. The
rules of law preventing its being turned to such a purpose, increase
in number and stringency as the jurisprudence unfolds itself; and
these rules correspond doubtless with the abiding sentiment of Roman
society, as distinguished from occasional variations of feeling in
individuals. It would rather seem as if the Testamentary Power were
chiefly valued for the assistance it gave in _making provision_ for a
Family, and in dividing the inheritance more evenly and fairly than
the Law of Intestate Succession would have divided it. If this be the
true reading of the general sentiment on