by it was entitled to appeal
to the superior of the decreeing authority, probably obtained
even now the great extension, out of which the subsequent imperial
appellate jurisdiction arose; perhaps all the magistrates
administering law, at least the governors of all the provinces,
were regarded so far as subordinates of the ruler, that appeal
to him might be lodged from any of their decrees.

Decay of the Judicial System

Certainly these innovations, the most important of which--
the general extension given to appeal--cannot even be reckoned
absolutely an improvement, by no means healed thoroughly the evils
from which the Roman administration of justice was suffering.
Criminal procedure cannot be sound in any slave-state, inasmuch as
the task of proceeding against slaves lies, if not de jure,
at least de facto in the hands of the master. The Roman master,
as may readily be conceived, punished throughout the crime of his serf,
not as a crime, but only so far as it rendered the slave useless
or disagreeable to him; slave criminals were merely drafted off
somewhat like oxen addicted to goring, and, as the latter
were sold to the butcher, so were the former sold to the fencing-booth.
But even the criminal procedure against free men, which had been
from the outset and always in great part continued to be
a political process, had amidst the disorder of the last generations
become transformed from a grave legal proceeding into a faction-
fight to be fought out by means of favour, money, and violence.
The blame rested jointly on all that took part in it, on the magistrates,
the jury, the parties, even the public who were spectators;
but the most incurable wounds were inflicted on justice by the doings
of the advocates. In proportion as the parasitic plant
of Roman forensic eloquence flourished, all positive ideas of right
became broken up; and the distinction, so difficult of apprehension
by the public, between opinion and evidence was in reality
expelled from the Roman criminal practice. "A plain simple defendant,"
says a Roman advocate of much experience at this period, "may be accused
of any crime at pleasure which he has or has not committed, and will be
certainly condemned." Numerous pleadings in criminal causes
have been preserved to us from this epoch; there is hardly one of them
which makes even a serious attempt to fix the crime in question
and to put into proper shape the proof or counterproof.(31)
That the co