r, possessed the greatest influence,--the rich. Aristocracy
of property and democracy confronted each other, accordingly, even there
where externally complete equality of political rights existed.

Under the mother-right, there was no written law. The relations were
simple, and custom was held sacred. Under the new, and much more
complicated order, written law was one of the most important
requirements; and special organs became necessary to administer it. In
the measure that the legal relations and legal conditions gained in
intricacy, a special class of people gathered shape, who made the study
of the law their special vocation, and who finally had a special
interest in rendering the law ever more complicated. Then arose the men
learned in the laws, the jurists, who, due to the importance of the
statutory law to the whole of society, rose to influential social rank.
The new system of rights found in the course of time its classic
expression in the Roman State, whence the influence that Roman law
exercises down to the present.

The institution of the State is, accordingly, the necessary result of a
social order, that, standing upon the higher plane of the subdivision of
labor, is broken up into a large number of occupations, animated by
different, frequently conflicting, interests, and hence has the
oppression of the weaker for a consequence. This fact was recognized
even by an Arabian tribe, the Nabateans, who, according to Diodorus,
established the regulation not to sow, not to plant, to drink no wine,
and to build no houses, but to live in tents, because if those things
were done, _they could be easily compelled to obey by a superior power_
(the power of the State). Likewise among the Rachebites, the descendants
of the father-in-law of Moses, there existed similar prescriptions.[17]
Aye, the whole Mosaic system of laws is aimed at _preventing the Jews
from moving out of an agricultural state, because otherwise, so the
legislators feared, their democratic-communistic society would go
under_. Hence the selection of the "Promised Land" in a region bounded,
on one side, by a not very accessible mountain range, the Lebanon; on
the other side, South and East, by but slightly fertile stretches of
land, partly by deserts;--a region, accordingly, that rendered isolation
possible. Hence came the keeping of the Jews away from the sea, which
favored commerce, colonization and the accumulation of wealth; hence the
rigid laws co