n of a _delict_,
_wrong_, or _tort_ be that the person who suffers it, and not the
State, is conceived to be wronged, it may be asserted that in the
infancy of jurisprudence the citizen depends for protection against
violence or fraud not on the Law of Crime but on the Law of Tort.

Torts then are copiously enlarged upon in primitive jurisprudence. It
must be added that Sins are known to it also. Of the Teutonic codes it
is almost unnecessary to make this assertion, because those codes, in
the form in which we have received them, were compiled or recast by
Christian legislators. But it is also true that non-Christian bodies
of archaic law entail penal consequences on certain classes of acts
and on certain classes of omissions, as being violations of divine
prescriptions and commands. The law administered at Athens by the
Senate of Areopagus was probably a special religious code, and at
Rome, apparently from a very early period, the Pontifical
jurisprudence punished adultery, sacrilege and perhaps murder. There
were therefore in the Athenian and in the Roman States laws punishing
_sins_. There were also laws punishing _torts_. The conception of
offence against God produced the first class of ordinances; the
conception of offence against one's neighbour produced the second; but
the idea of offence against the State or aggregate community did not
at first produce a true criminal jurisprudence.

Yet it is not to be supposed that a conception so simple and
elementary as that of wrong done to the State was wanting in any
primitive society. It seems rather that the very distinctness with
which this conception is realised is the true cause which at first
prevents the growth of a criminal law. At all events, when the Roman
community conceived itself to be injured, the analogy of a personal
wrong received was carried out to its consequences with absolute
literalness, and the State avenged itself by a single act on the
individual wrong-doer. The result was that, in the infancy of the
commonwealth, every offence vitally touching its security or its
interests was punished by a separate enactment of the legislature. And
this is the earliest conception of a _crimen_ or Crime--an act
involving such high issues that the State, instead of leaving its
cognisance to the civil tribunal or the religious court, directed a
special law or _privilegium_ against the perpetrator. Every indictment
therefore took the form of a bill of pains and pe