d enjoyment had ripened their holding into a
species of ownership, and that it would be unjust to eject them for
the purpose of redistributing the domain. The association of this
claim with the Patrician tenancies, permanently influenced the sense
of "possession." Meanwhile the only legal remedies of which the
tenants could avail themselves, if ejected or threatened with
disturbance, were the Possessory Interdicts, summary processes of
Roman law which were either expressly devised by the Praetor for their
protection, or else, according to another theory, had in older times
been employed for the provisional maintenance of possessions pending
the settlement of questions of legal right. It came, therefore, to be
understood that everybody who possessed property _as his own_ had the
power of demanding the Interdicts, and, by a system of highly
artificial pleading, the Interdictal process was moulded into a shape
fitted for the trial of conflicting claims to a disputed possession.
Then commenced a movement which, as Mr. John Austin pointed out,
exactly reproduced itself in English law. Proprietors, _domini_, began
to prefer the simpler forms or speedier course of the Interdict to the
lagging and intricate formalities of the Real Action, and for the
purpose of availing themselves of the possessory remedy fell back
upon the possession which was supposed to be involved in their
proprietorship. The liberty conceded to persons who were not true
Possessors, but Owners, to vindicate their rights by possessory
remedies, though it may have been at first a boon, had ultimately the
effect of seriously deteriorating both English and Roman
jurisprudence. The Roman law owes to it those subtleties on the
subject of Possession which have done so much to discredit it, while
English law, after the actions which it appropriated to the recovery
of real property had fallen into the most hopeless confusion, got rid
at last of the whole tangled mass by a heroic remedy. No one can doubt
that the virtual abolition of the English real actions which took
place nearly thirty years since was a public benefit, but still
persons sensitive to the harmonies of jurisprudence will lament that,
instead of cleansing, improving, and simplifying the true proprietary
actions, we sacrificed them all to the possessory action of ejectment,
thus basing our whole system of land recovery upon a legal fiction.

Legal tribunals have also powerfully assisted to shape and mo