stimulated the spirit of individualism; buyers and sellers of land alike become impatient of the necessity for obtaining the public consent of the villagers to their bargain; the modern Anglo-Indian law is unfavourable to these archaic restrictions; and thus the primitive public methods of alienation are everywhere giving way to private transfers. In the historically ancient world, the same results were most probably produced by conquest and by the absorption of one or more of the primitive proprietary groups by others stronger than themselves. In the Roman State, including a population ever more and more miscellaneous, we find, at the outset of legal history, a mere shadow of the old forms of transfer in the Mancipation; and Mancipation, long before its abolition by Justinian, was subordinated by every sort of legal contrivance to mere Delivery or Tradition. Yet even Tradition, when it became the sole Roman conveyance, retained some trace of the institutions out of which it grew. The Roman law never to the last allowed the dominium or right of property to be passed from one person to another by a mere contract; it was absolutely necessary that the contract should be followed by the delivery of the Thing which was its subject. This is a peculiarity

1 Two valuable Acts of the Indian Legislature, the Registration and Transfer of Property Acts, are mitigating the evils arising from the privacy and heterogeneous forms of these transfers.

which has more than once caused perplexity to persons who have consulted the Roman law of Transfer in ignorance of its being founded on a principle which the English law and the French Code have abandoned.

The other fact to which I wish to call attention is not merely curious, but highly instructive. The tendency of German juridical opinion, which I have mentioned, shows that we are in danger of overestimating the stability of legal conceptions. Legal conceptions are indeed extremely stable; many of them have their roots in the most solid portions of our nature, and those of them with which we are most familiar have been for ages under the protection of irresistible sovereign power. Their great stability is apt to suggest that they are absolutely permanent and indestructible; and this assumption seems to me to be sometimes made not only by superficial minds, but by strong and clear intellects. I am not sure that even such juridical thinkers as Bentham and Austin are quite free from it. They sometimes write as if they thought that, although obscured by false theory, false logic, and false statement, there is somewhere behind all the delusions which they expose a framework of permanent legal conceptions which is discoverable by a trained eye, looking through a dry light, and to which a rational Code may always be fitted. What I have stated as to the

effects upon law of a mere mechanical improvement in land registration is a very impressive warning that this position is certainly doubtful, and possibly not true. The legal notions which I described as decaying and dwindling have always been regarded as belonging to what may be called the osseous structure of jurisprudence; the fact that they are nevertheless perishable suggests very forcibly that even jurisprudence itself cannot escape from the great law of Evolution.

CHAPTER XI.

CLASSIFICATIONS OF LEGAL RULES.

ALMOST the first thing which is learnt by the student of Roman law is, that the classical jurists of Rome divided the whole body of legal rules into the Law of Persons, the Law of Things, and the Law of Actions. Although, however, his studies, as law is now taught amongst us, may soon introduce him to some vehement disputes as to the meaning of this classification, he

may be long in becoming alive to the extent and importance of the literature to which it has given birth. It would seem, in fact, that in the seventeenth century, which was a great juridical era, theories of legal classification took very much the place of those theories of law reform which so occupied the minds of the last generation of Englishmen. The continuous activity of legislatures is an altogether modern phenomenon; and, before it began, an intellect of the type of Bentham's, instead of speculating on the possibility of transforming the law into conformity with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or with any other principle, speculated rather

on the possibility of rearranging it in new and more philosophical order. The improvement in view was thus rather a reform of law-books than a reform of law. The most extreme example of such theories is, perhaps, to be found in the attempt of Domat to distribute all law under its two great commandments' as set forth in the twenty-second chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel-love to God and love to one's neighbour. But on the whole the arrangement in which the compilers of Justinian's 'Institutes' followed Gaius, distributing law in Law of Persons, Law of Things, and Law of Actions, became the point of departure for theories of legal classification. Its history has been not unlike that of several equally famous propositions. After long neglect, it came to be regarded as an expression of absolute truth, and an essential and fundamental distinction was assumed to exist between the three great departments into which the Romans divided law. English jurisprudence was, no doubt, very little affected by this assumption, but English lawyers occasionally come across the inferences from it when they have to deal with Private International law, or, in other words, with the conditions upon which one community will recognise and apply a portion of the jurisprudence of another. At a later date certain difficulties were observed in the rigorous application of the Roman doctrine, and much ingenuity was expended in removing