oughout the compass
of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,
there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan
ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality
was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape
was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown
out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.
The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law
of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth
at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily
to administer other law (108)--a regulation, which may well
be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became
almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law
as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although
after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer
subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict;
and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law
in judicial usage as in legal instruction--every urban judge
was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily
to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions
still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that
in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be
set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates,
and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.
The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court
of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial
judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure
of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary
to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not
been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter
to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual
urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application
by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesars design,
when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been
otherwise. The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome
state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated
till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards,
and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar,
the Emperor Justinian.

Lastly, in money, measures, and