hing of which all positive law was but declaratory, as something
by which actual rules were to be measured, to which so far as possible
they were to be made to conform, by which new rules were to be framed
and by which old rules were to be extended or restricted in their
application, was a powerful instrument in the hands of the jurists and
enabled them to proceed in their task of legal construction with
assured confidence.

But the juristic empiricism by which the _ius ciuile_ was made into a
law of the world needed something more than a theoretical incentive.
It was a process of analogical development by extension here and
restriction there, of generalization, first in the form of maxims and
later by laying down broad principles, and of cautious striking out of
new paths, giving them course and direction by trial and error. It was
a process very like that by which Anglo-American judicial empiricism
has been able to make a law of the world on the basis of the legal
precepts of seventeenth-century England. Such a process required
something to give direction to juristic reasoning, to give definite
content to the ideal, to provide a reasonably defined channel for
juristic thought. This need was met by the philosophical theory of the
nature of things and of the law of nature as conformity thereto. In
practice jurist-made and judge-made law have been molded consciously,
or unconsciously, by ideas as to what law is for; by theories as to
the end of law. In the beginnings of law men had no more ambitious
conception than a peaceable ordering of society at any cost. But the
Greeks soon got a better conception of an orderly and peaceable
maintaining of the social _status quo_. When the theory of natural law
is applied to that conception, we get the notion of an ideal form of
the social _status quo_--a form which expresses its nature, a perfect
form of the social organization of a given civilization--as that which
the legal order is to further and maintain. Thus judge and jurist
obtain a guide which has served them well ever since. They are to
measure all situations by an idealized form of the social order of the
time and place and are so to shape the law as to make it maintain and
further this ideal of the social _status quo_. We shall meet this idea
in various forms throughout the subsequent history of the philosophy
of law. It constitutes the permanent contribution of Rome to legal
philosophy.

As soon as scientific legal de