y enfeebled.

I will mention two more singularities of the Roman Criminal System
which were produced by the same theory of judicial authority. They
are, the extreme multiplicity of the Roman criminal tribunals, and the
capricious and anomalous classification of crimes which characterised
Roman penal jurisprudence throughout its entire history. Every
_Quaestio_, it has been said, whether Perpetual or otherwise, had its
origin in a distinct statute. From the law which created it, it
derived its authority; it rigorously observed the limits which its
charter prescribed to it, and touched no form of criminality which
that charter did not expressly define. As then the statutes which
constituted the various Quaestiones were all called forth by particular
emergencies, each of them being in fact passed to punish a class of
acts which the circumstances of the time rendered particularly odious
or particularly dangerous, these enactments made not the slightest
reference to each other, and were connected by no common principle.
Twenty or thirty different criminal laws were in existence together,
with exactly the same number of Quaestiones to administer them; nor was
any attempt made during the Republic to fuse these distinct judicial
bodies into one, or to give symmetry to the provisions of the statutes
which appointed them and defined their duties. The state of the Roman
criminal jurisdiction at this period, exhibited some resemblances to
the administration of civil remedies in England at the time when the
English Courts of Common Law had not as yet introduced those
fictitious averments into their writs which enabled them to trespass
on each other's peculiar province. Like the Quaestiones, the Courts of
Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer were all theoretical
emanations from a higher authority, and each entertained a special
class of cases supposed to be committed to it by the fountain of its
jurisdiction; but then the Roman Quaestiones were many more than three
in number, and it was infinitely less easy to discriminate the acts
which fell under the cognisance of each Quaestio, than to distinguish
between the provinces of the three Courts in Westminster Hall. The
difficulty of drawing exact lines between the spheres of the different
Quaestiones made the multiplicity of Roman tribunals something more
than a mere inconvenience; for we read with astonishment that when it
was not immediately clear under what general description