w jurisconsults,
the prince shall be everything in the land and the people naught. The
people shall only obey, pay tax, and do service. Moreover, they shall
not alone obey the prince but also them that he has placed in
authority, who begin to puff themselves up as the proper lords of the
land, and to order matters so that the princes themselves do as little
as may be reign." From this passage it will be seen that the modern
bureaucratic State, in which government is as nearly as possible
reduced to mechanism and the personal relation abolished, was ushered
in under the auspices of the civil law. How easy it was for the
civilian to effect the abolition of feudal institutions may be readily
imagined by those cognizant of the principles of Roman law. For
example, the Roman law, of course, making no mention of the right of
the mediaeval "estates" to be consulted in the levying of taxes or in
other questions, the jurist would explain this right to his too
willing master, the prince, as an abuse which had no legal
justification, and which, the sooner it were abolished in the interest
of good government the better it would be. All feudal rights as
against the power of an overlord were explained away by the civil
jurist, either as pernicious abuses, or, at best, as favours granted
in the past by the predecessors of the reigning monarch, which it was
within his right to truncate or to abrogate at his will.

From the preceding survey will be clearly perceived the important role
which the new jurisprudence played on the Continent of Europe in the
gestation of the new phase which history was entering upon in the
sixteenth century. Even the short sketch given will be sufficient to
show that it was not in one department only that it operated; but
that, in addition to its own domain of law proper, its influence was
felt in modifying economical, political, and indirectly even ethical
and religious conditions. From this time forth Feudalism slowly but
surely gave place to the newer order, all that remained being certain
of its features, which, crystallized into bureaucratic forms, were
doubly veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas and a denser
coating of civilian conceptions. This transitional Europe, and not
mediaeval Europe, was the Europe which lasted on until the eighteenth
century, and which practically came to an end with the French
Revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] One silver groschen = 1-1/5d.

[16] The authorities for