ice of its time and trouble. Mr. Kemble expressly assigns this
character to the Anglo-Saxon _bannum_ or _fredum_.

Ancient law furnishes other proofs that the earliest administrators of
justice simulated the probable acts of persons engaged in a private
quarrel. In settling the damages to be awarded, they took as their
guide the measure of vengeance likely to be exacted by an aggrieved
person under the circumstances of the case. This is the true
explanation of the very different penalties imposed by ancient law on
offenders caught in the act or soon after it and on offenders detected
after considerable delay. Some strange exemplifications of this
peculiarity are supplied by the old Roman law of Theft. The Laws of
the Twelve Tables seem to have divided Thefts into Manifest and
Non-Manifest, and to have allotted extraordinarily different penalties
to the offence according as it fell under one head or the other. The
Manifest Thief was he who was caught within the house in which he had
been pilfering, or who was taken while making off to a place of safety
with the stolen goods; the Twelve Tables condemned him to be put to
death if he were already a slave, and, if he was a freeman, they made
him the bondsman of the owner of the property. The Non-Manifest Thief
was he who was detected under any other circumstances than those
described; and the old code simply directed that an offender of this
sort should refund double the value of what he had stolen. In Gaius's
day the excessive severity of the Twelve Tables to the Manifest Thief
had naturally been much mitigated, but the law still maintained the
old principle by mulcting him in fourfold the value of the stolen
goods, while the Non-Manifest Thief still continued to pay merely the
double. The ancient lawgiver doubtless considered that the injured
proprietor, if left to himself, would inflict a very different
punishment when his blood was hot from that with which he would be
satisfied when the Thief was detected after a considerable interval;
and to this calculation the legal scale of penalties was adjusted. The
principle is precisely the same as that followed in the Anglo-Saxon
and other Germanic codes, when they suffer a thief chased down and
caught with the booty to be hanged or decapitated on the spot, while
they exact the full penalties of homicide from anybody who kills him
after the pursuit has been intermitted. These archaic distinctions
bring home to us very forcibly t