as was the state in public affairs.  A feature eminently characteristic was the system of credit.  There did not exist any credit on landed security, but instead of a debt on mortgage the step which constitutes at present the final stage in mortgage-procedure —­the delivery of the property from the debtor to the creditor—­took place at once.  On the other hand personal credit was guaranteed in the most summary, not to say extravagant fashion; for the lawgiver entitled the creditor to treat his insolvent debtor like a thief, and granted to him in entire legislative earnest what Shylock, half in jest, stipulated for from his mortal enemy, guarding indeed by special clauses the point as to the cutting off too much more carefully than did the Jew.  The law could not have more clearly expressed its design, which was to establish at once an independent agriculture free of debt and a mercantile credit, and to suppress with stringent energy all merely nominal ownership and all breaches of fidelity.  If we further take into consideration the right of settlement recognized at an early date as belonging to all the Latins,(8) and the validity which was likewise early pronounced to belong to civil marriage,(9) we shall perceive that this state, which made the highest demands on its burgesses and carried the idea of subordinating the individual to the interest of the whole further than any state before or since has done, only did and only could do so by itself removing the barriers to intercourse and unshackling liberty quite as much as it subjected it to restriction.  In permission or in prohibition the law was always absolute.  As the foreigner who had none to intercede for him was like the hunted deer, so the guest was on a footing of equality with the burgess.  A contract did not ordinarily furnish a ground of action, but where the right of the creditor was acknowledged, it was so all-powerful that there was no deliverance for the poor debtor, and no humane or equitable consideration was shown towards him.  It seemed as if the law found a pleasure in presenting on all sides its sharpest spikes, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcibly obtruding on the bluntest understanding the tyrannic nature of the idea of right.  The poetical form and the genial symbolism, which so pleasingly prevail in the Germanic legal ordinances, were foreign to the Roman; in his law all was clear and precise; no symbol was employed, no institution was superfluous.  It was not cruel; everything necessary was performed without much ceremony, even the punishment of death; that a free man could not be tortured was a primitive maxim of Roman law, to obtain which other peoples have had to struggle for thousands of years.  Yet this law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors’ towers of the rich.  But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of freedom and of subordination, of property and of legal redress, reigned and still at the present day reign unadulterated and unmodified.