, one standard of rights, one rate of taxation, one
religion, and to make it equally applicable to Spain and Britain,
Greece and Africa, Gaul and Asia Minor. There were, of course, common
to all the empire certain rules essential to civilisation, certain
natural laws and laws of all nations. Murder, violence, robbery,
deliberate sacrilege, and so forth were punishable everywhere, though
not necessarily by the same authority nor in the same manner.
Necessarily it was held everywhere that contracts must be fulfilled
and debts paid. Beyond the fact that Rome demanded peace and order and
the essentials of civilised life, and provided machinery to secure
those ends, she troubled little about differences of local procedure
and varieties of local law, so long as the Roman rule was duly
recognised and the Roman taxes duly paid. As with Great Britain, her
care was for results, not for machinery, or, as the great Roman
historian puts it, she "valued the reality of the empire, not the
show."

Outside Italy there spread the provinces. These had been conquered or
peacefully annexed at various times. A number of small states had come
in by perpetual alliance. Some provinces, such as Gaul, had formerly
been divided among tribes and tribal chiefs. Some, such as Greece, had
consisted of highly civilised city-communities with small territories
and managing their own affairs, although they might all alike be
acknowledging the suzerainty of some powerful prince. Some, such as
Cappadocia, Syria, and Egypt, had been under their native kings.
Judaea was a peculiar example of a small theocratic state, in which
the chief power lay with the priests.

Rome was too wise to meddle more than she need with existing
conditions. She preferred as far as possible to accept the existing
machinery and to use it, with only necessary modifications, as her
instrument of administration. To the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem, for
example, she conceded a large criminal jurisdiction over
ecclesiastical offenders, so long as that jurisdiction did not limit
the universal rights of a "Roman citizen."

When a province was conquered, all its territory became technically
the property of the Roman state. Some of it was kept as such, and
mines of gold, silver, lead, iron, and salt, or quarries of marble,
granite, and gravel, were commonly annexed as state property. If it
was expedient to allot some portion of the conquered land to a Roman
settlement--commonly a settlement of