or of the family property
restricting the individual's power of disposal. Such institutions
must probably at one time have existed among the Italians; traces
of them may perhaps be found in particular institutions of ritual,
e. g. in the expiatory goat, which the involuntary homicide was
obliged to give to the nearest of kin to the slain; but even at the
earliest period of Rome which we can conceive this stage had long
been transcended. The clan and the family doubtless were not
annihilated in the Roman community; but the theoretical as well
as the practical omnipotence of the state in its own sphere was no
more limited by them than by the freedom which the state granted
and guaranteed to the burgess. The ultimate foundation of law was
in all cases the state; freedom was simply another expression for
the right of citizenship in its widest sense; all property was
based on express or tacit transference by the community to the
individual; a contract was valid only so far as the community by
its representatives attested it, a testament only so far as the
community confirmed it. The provinces of public and private law were
definitely and clearly discriminated: the former having reference
to crimes against the state, which immediately called for the
judgment of the state and always involved capital punishment; the
latter having reference to offences against a fellow-burgess or a
guest, which were mainly disposed of in the way of compromise by
expiation or satisfaction made to the party injured, and were never
punished with the forfeit of life, but, at most, with the loss of
freedom. The greatest liberality in the permission of commerce and
the most rigorous procedure in execution went hand in hand; just
as in commercial states at the present day the universal right to
draw bills of exchange appears in conjunction with a strict procedure
in regard to them. The burgess and the client stood in their
dealings on a footing of entire equality; state-treaties conceded
a comprehensive equality of rights also to the guest; women were
placed completely on a level in point of legal capacity with men,
although restricted in action; the boy had scarcely grown up when
he received at once the most comprehensive powers in the disposal
of his estate, and every one who could dispose at all was as
sovereign in his own sphere as was the state in public affairs. A
feature eminently characteristic was the system of credit. There
did not e