When, however, the senate came to be made up of men whom the great generals selected; when the tribunes played into the hands of the very men they were created to oppose; when the high-priest of a people, originally religious, was chosen politically and without regard to moral or religious consideration; when aristocratic nobles left their own ranks to steal the few offices which the people controlled,—­then the constitution, under which the Romans had advanced to the conquest of the world, became subverted, and the empire was a consolidated despotism.

Under the emperors there was no constitution, since they combined in their own persons all the great offices of state, and controlled the senate, the army, the tribunals of the law, the distant provinces, the city itself, and regulated taxes and imposed burdens as they pleased.  The senate lost its independence, the courts their justice, the army its spirit, and the people their hopes.  And yet the old forms remained; the senate met as in the days of the Gracchi, and there were consuls and praetors as before.

However much we may deplore the subversion of the Roman constitution and the absolute reign of the emperors, in which most historians see a political necessity, there was yet under these emperors, whether good or bad, the reign of law, the bequest of five hundred years’ experience.  The emperors reigned despotically, but under the forms of legislation.  Nor did they attempt to subvert laws which did not interfere with their own political power.  What is called jurisprudence they even improved, as that later imperial despot Napoleon gave a code to the nation he ruled.  It is this science of jurisprudence, for which the Romans had a genius, that gives them their highest claim to be ranked among the benefactors of mankind.  They created legal science.  Its aim was justice,—­equity in the relations between man and man.  This was the pride of the Roman world, even under the rule of tyrants and madmen, and this has survived all the calamities of fifteen hundred years.  The Roman laws—­founded by the Republic, but symmetrically completed by the Empire—­have more powerfully affected the interests of civilization than have the philosophy and arts of Greece.  Roman jurisprudence was not perfectly developed until five hundred years after the Christian era, when Justinian consolidated it into the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes.  The classical jurists, like Gaius, Ulpian, and Paulus, may have laid the foundation, but the superstructure was raised under the auspices of the imperial despots.

The earliest code of Roman laws was called the Twelve Tables, framed from the report of the commissioners sent to Athens and other Greek States, to collect what was most useful in their legal systems.  The laws of the Twelve Tables were the basis of all the Roman laws, civil and religious.  But the edicts of the praetors, who were the great equity judges as well as the common-law magistrates, proclaimed certain