given through its representatives,
which could under no circumstances be departed from, and which could
only be modified in their operation by legal quibbles that left to
them their nominal integrity. The new law could therefore only be
administered by a class of men trained specially for the purpose, of
which the plastic customary law borne down the stream of history from
primitive times, and insensibly adapting itself to new conditions but
understood in its broader aspects by all those who might be called to
administer it, had little need. The Roman law, the study of which was
started at Bologna in the twelfth century, as might naturally be
expected, early attracted the attention of the German Emperors as a
suitable instrument for use on emergencies. But it made little real
headway in Germany itself as against the early institutions until the
fifteenth century, when the provincial power of the princes of the
empire was beginning to overshadow the central authority of the
titular chief of the Holy Roman Empire. The former, while strenuously
resisting the results of its application from above, found in it a
powerful auxiliary in their Courts in riveting their power over the
estates subject to them. As opposed to the delicately adjusted
hierarchical notions of Feudalism, which did not recognize any
absoluteness of dominion either over persons or things, in short for
which neither the head of the State had any inviolate authority as
such, nor private property any inviolable rights or sanctity as such,
the new jurisprudence made corner-stones of both these conceptions.

Even the canon law, consisting in a mass of Papal decretals dating
from the early Middle Ages, and which, while undoubtedly containing
considerable traces of the influence of Roman law, was nevertheless
largely customary in its character, with an infusion of Christian
ethics, had to yield to the new jurisprudence, and that too in
countries where the Reformation had been unable to replace the old
ecclesiastical dogma and organization. The principles and practice of
the Roman law were sedulously inculcated by the tribe of civilian
lawyers who by the beginning of the sixteenth century infested every
Court throughout Europe. Every potentate, great and small, little as
he might like its application by his feudal overlord to himself, was
yet only too ready and willing to invoke its aid for the oppression of
his own vassals or peasants. Thus the civil law everywh