nals between citizen and foreigner,
between freeman and slave, between Agnate and Cognate. The
jurisconsults who thus expressed themselves most certainly never
intended to censure the social arrangements under which civil law fell
somewhat short of its speculative type; nor did they apparently
believe that the world would ever see human society completely
assimilated to the economy of nature. But when the doctrine of human
equality makes its appearance in a modern dress it has evidently
clothed itself with a new shade of meaning. Where the Roman
jurisconsult had written "aequales sunt," meaning exactly what he said,
the modern civilian wrote "all men are equal" in the sense of "all men
ought to be equal." The peculiar Roman idea that natural law coexisted
with civil law and gradually absorbed it, had evidently been lost
sight of, or had become unintelligible, and the words which had at
most conveyed a theory concerning the origin, composition, and
development of human institutions, were beginning to express the sense
of a great standing wrong suffered by mankind. As early as the
beginning of the fourteenth century, the current language concerning
the birth-state of men, though visibly intended to be identical with
that of Ulpian and his contemporaries, has assumed an altogether
different form and meaning. The preamble to the celebrated ordinance
of King Louis Hutin enfranchising the serfs of the royal domains would
have sounded strangely to Roman ears. "Whereas, according to natural
law, everybody ought to be born free; and by some usages and customs
which, from long antiquity, have been introduced and kept until now in
our realm, and peradventure by reason of the misdeeds of their
predecessors, many persons of our common people have fallen into
servitude, therefore, We, etc." This is the enunciation not of a legal
rule but of a political dogma; and from this time the equality of men
is spoken of by the French lawyers just as if it were a political
truth which happened to have been preserved among the archives of
their science. Like all other deductions from the hypothesis of a Law
Natural, and like the belief itself in a Law of Nature, it was
languidly assented to and suffered to have little influence on opinion
and practice until it passed out of the possession of the lawyers into
that of the literary men of the eighteenth century and of the public
which sat at their feet. With them it became the most distinct tenet
o