be rendered by all in concert to any community assailed,
and whatever is won in joint warfare shall be equally
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 political rights
only where he was enrolled as a burgess; but on the
other hand it was implied in an equality of private
rights, that any Latin could take up his abode in
any place within the Latin bounds; or, to use the
phraseology of the present day, there existed, side
by side with the special burgess-rights of the individual
communities, a general right of settlement co-extensive
with the confederacy; and, after the plebeian was