s of their city. In Plato the idea of maintaining
the social order through the law is fully developed. The actual social
order was by no means what it should be. Men were to be reclassified
and everyone assigned to the class for which he was best fitted. But
when the classification and the assignment had been made the law was
to keep him there. It was not a device to set him free that he might
find his own level by free competition with his fellows and free
experiment with his natural powers. It was a device to prevent such
disturbances of the social order by holding each individual to his
appointed place. As Plato puts it, the shoemaker is to be only a
shoemaker and not a pilot also; the farmer is to be only a farmer and
not a judge as well; the soldier is to be only a soldier and not a
man of business besides; and if a universal genius who through wisdom
can be everything and do everything comes to the ideal city-state, he
is to be required to move on. Aristotle puts the same idea in another
way, asserting that justice is a condition in which each keeps within
his appointed sphere; that we first take account of relations of
inequality, treating individuals according to their worth, and then
secondarily of relations of equality in the classes into which their
worth requires them to be assigned. When St. Paul exhorted wives to
obey their husbands, and servants to obey their masters, and thus
everyone to exert himself to do his duty in the class where the social
order had put him, he expressed this Greek conception of the end of
law.

Roman lawyers made the Greek philosophical conception into a juristic
theory. For the famous three precepts to which the law is reduced in
Justinian's Institutes come to this: Everyone is to live honorably; he
is to "preserve moral worth in his own person" by conforming to the
conventions of the social order. Everyone is to respect the
personality of others; he is not to interfere with those interests and
powers of action, conceded to others by the social order, which make
up their legal personality. Everyone is to render to everyone else his
own; he is to respect the acquired rights of others. The social system
has defined certain things as belonging to each individual. Justice is
defined in the Institutes as the set and constant purpose of giving
him these things. It consists in rendering them to him and in not
interfering with his having and using them within the defined limits.
This is