itors of the law,
an influence wholly unknown where there exists a Bench, the
depositaries intrusted by king or commonwealth with the prerogative
of justice. But the chief agency, no doubt, was the uncontrolled
multiplication of cases for legal decision. The state of facts which
caused genuine perplexity to a country client was not a whit more
entitled to form the basis of the jurisconsult's Response, or legal
decision, than a set of hypothetical circumstances propounded by an
ingenious pupil. All combinations of fact were on precisely the same
footing, whether they were real or imaginary. It was nothing to the
jurisconsult that his opinion was overruled for the moment by the
magistrate who adjudicated on his client's case, unless that
magistrate happened to rank above him in legal knowledge or the esteem
of his profession. I do not, indeed, mean it to be inferred that he
would wholly omit to consider his client's advantage, for the client
was in earlier times the great lawyer's constituent and at a later
period his paymaster, but the main road to the rewards of ambition lay
through the good opinion of his order, and it is obvious that under
such a system as I have been describing this was much more likely to
be secured by viewing each case as an illustration of a great
principle, or an exemplification of a broad rule, than by merely
shaping it for an insulated forensic triumph. A still more powerful
influence must have been exercised by the want of any distinct check
on the suggestion or invention of possible questions. Where the data
can be multiplied at pleasure, the facilities for evolving a general
rule are immensely increased. As the law is administered among
ourselves, the judge cannot travel out of the sets of facts exhibited
before him or before his predecessors. Accordingly each group of
circumstances which is adjudicated upon receives, to employ a
Gallicism, a sort of consecration. It acquires certain qualities which
distinguish it from every other case genuine or hypothetical. But at
Rome, as I have attempted to explain, there was nothing resembling a
Bench or Chamber of judges; and therefore no combination of facts
possessed any particular value more than another. When a difficulty
came for opinion before the jurisconsult, there was nothing to prevent
a person endowed with a nice perception of analogy from at once
proceeding to adduce and consider an entire class of supposed
questions with which a particula