a legal development of the Greek idea of harmoniously
maintaining the social _status quo_. The later eastern empire carried
it to the extreme. Stability was to be secured by rigidly keeping
everyone to his trade or calling and his descendants were to follow
him therein. Thus the harmony of society and the social order would
not be disturbed by individual ambition.

In the Middle Ages the primitive idea of law as designed only to keep
the peace came back with Germanic law. But the study of Roman law
presently taught the Roman version of the Greek conception and the
legal order was thought of once more as an orderly maintenance of the
social _status quo_. This conception answered to the needs of medieval
society, in which men had found relief from anarchy and violence in
relations of service and protection and a social organization which
classified men in terms of such relations and required them to be held
to their functions as so determined. Where the Greeks thought of a
stationary society corrected from time to time with reference to its
nature or ideal, the Middle Ages thought of a stationary society
resting upon authority and determined by custom or tradition. To each,
law was a system of precepts existing to maintain this stationary
society as it was.

In the feudal social order reciprocal duties involved in relations
established by tradition and taken to rest on authority were the
significant legal institutions. With the gradual disintegration of
this order and the growing importance of the individual in a society
engaged in discovery, colonization and trade, to secure the claims of
individuals to assert themselves freely in the new fields of human
activity which were opening on every side became a more pressing
social want than to maintain the social institutions by which the
system of reciprocal duties was enforced and the relations involving
those duties were preserved. Men did not so much desire that others
perform for them the duties owing in some relation, as that others
keep hands off while they achieved what they might for themselves in a
world that continually afforded new opportunities to the active and
the daring. The demand was no longer that men be kept in their
appointed grooves. Friction and waste were apprehended, not from men
getting out of these grooves, but from attempts to hold them there by
means devised to meet the needs of a different social order whereby
they were made to chafe under arbi