e they combined in
their own persons all the great offices of state, and controlled the
senate, the army, the tribunals of the law, the distant provinces, the
city itself, and regulated taxes and imposed burdens as they pleased.
The senate lost its independence, the courts their justice, the army its
spirit, and the people their hopes. And yet the old forms remained; the
senate met as in the days of the Gracchi, and there were consuls and
praetors as before.

However much we may deplore the subversion of the Roman constitution and
the absolute reign of the emperors, in which most historians see a
political necessity, there was yet under these emperors, whether good or
bad, the reign of law, the bequest of five hundred years' experience.
The emperors reigned despotically, but under the forms of legislation.
Nor did they attempt to subvert laws which did not interfere with their
own political power. What is called jurisprudence they even improved, as
that later imperial despot Napoleon gave a code to the nation he ruled.
It is this science of jurisprudence, for which the Romans had a genius,
that gives them their highest claim to be ranked among the benefactors
of mankind. They created legal science. Its aim was justice,--equity in
the relations between man and man. This was the pride of the Roman
world, even under the rule of tyrants and madmen, and this has survived
all the calamities of fifteen hundred years. The Roman laws--founded by
the Republic, but symmetrically completed by the Empire--have more
powerfully affected the interests of civilization than have the
philosophy and arts of Greece. Roman jurisprudence was not perfectly
developed until five hundred years after the Christian era, when
Justinian consolidated it into the Code, the Pandects, and the
Institutes. The classical jurists, like Gaius, Ulpian, and Paulus, may
have laid the foundation, but the superstructure was raised under the
auspices of the imperial despots.

The earliest code of Roman laws was called the Twelve Tables, framed
from the report of the commissioners sent to Athens and other Greek
States, to collect what was most useful in their legal systems. The laws
of the Twelve Tables were the basis of all the Roman laws, civil and
religious. But the edicts of the praetors, who were the great equity
judges as well as the common-law magistrates, proclaimed certain changes
which custom and the practice of the courts had introduced; and these,
adde