so, and
it was the first stage of a transmutation of the conception of Equity,
which almost every ethical system which has appeared since those days
has more or less helped to carry on.

Something must be said of the formal instrumentality by which the
principles and distinctions associated, first with the Law common to
all Nations, and afterwards with the Law of Nature, were gradually
incorporated with the Roman law. At the crisis of primitive Roman
history which is marked by the expulsion of the Tarquins, a change
occurred which has its parallel in the early annals of many ancient
states, but which had little in common with those passages of
political affairs which we now term revolutions. It may best be
described by saying that the monarchy was put into commission. The
powers heretofore accumulated in the hands of a single person were
parcelled out among a number of elective functionaries, the very name
of the kingly office being retained and imposed on a personage known
subsequently as the Rex Sacrorum or Rex Sacrificulus. As part of the
change, the settled duties of the supreme judicial office devolved on
the Praetor, at the time the first functionary in the commonwealth, and
together with these duties was transferred the undefined supremacy
over law and legislation which always attached to ancient sovereigns
and which is not obscurely related to the patriarchal and heroic
authority they had once enjoyed. The circumstances of Rome gave great
importance to the more indefinite portion of the functions thus as
transferred, as with the establishment of the republic began that
series of recurrent trials which overtook the state, in the difficulty
of dealing with a multitude of persons who, not coming within the
technical description of indigenous Romans, were nevertheless
permanently located within Roman jurisdiction. Controversies between
such persons, or between such persons and native-born citizens, would
have remained without the pale of the remedies provided by Roman law,
if the Praetor had not undertaken to decide them, and he must soon
have addressed himself to the more critical disputes which in the
extension of commerce arose between Roman subjects and avowed
foreigners. The great increase of such cases in the Roman Courts about
the period of the first Punic War is marked by the appointment of a
special Praetor, known subsequently as the Praetor Peregrinus, who gave
them his undivided attention. Meantime, one