distributed." The stipulated
equality of rights in trade and exchange, in commercial credit
and in inheritance, tended, by the manifold relations of business
intercourse to which it led, still further to interweave the
interests of communities already connected by the ties of similar
language and manners, and in this way produced an effect somewhat
similar to that of the abolition of customs-restrictions in our own
day. Each community certainly retained in form its own law: down
to the time of the Social war Latin law was not necessarily identical
with Roman: we find, for example, that the enforcing of betrothal
by action at law, which was abolished at an early period in Rome,
continued to subsist in the Latin communities. But the simple and
purely national development of Latin law, and the endeavour to
maintain as far as possible uniformity of rights, led at length
to the result, that the law of private relations was in matter and
form substantially the same throughout all Latium. This uniformity
of rights comes most distinctly into view in the rules laid down
regarding the loss and recovery of freedom on the part of the
individual burgess. According to an ancient and venerable maxim
of law among the Latin stock no burgess could become a slave
in the state wherein he had been free, or suffer the loss of his
burgess-rights while he remained within it: if he was to be punished
with the loss of freedom and of burgess-rights (which was the same
thing), it was necessary that he should be expelled from the state
and should enter on the condition of slavery among strangers. This
maxim of law was now extended to the whole territory of the league;
no member of any of the federal states might live as a slave within
the bounds of the league. Applications of this principle are seen
in the enactment embodied in the Twelve Tables, that the insolvent
debtor, in the event of his creditor wishing to sell him, must be
sold beyond the boundary of the Tiber, in other words, beyond the
territory of the league; and in the clause of the second treaty
between Rome and Carthage, that an ally of Rome who might be taken
prisoner by the Carthaginians should be free so soon as he entered
a Roman seaport. Although there did not probably subsist a general
intercommunion of marriage within the league, yet, as has been
already remarked(8) intermarriage between the different communities
frequently occurred. Each Latin could primarily exercise