governing and law-giving community of antiquity to which it is our proudest boast to compare ourselves.[1] Rome did not impose her own customs upon the stranger within her gates; she established a special tribunal before which he might plead according to his own usage, and which meted him out justice according to his own principles. Thus grew up a great body of law, different in origin, in principle, in scope from the native law of Rome. In their development the two systems influenced each other profoundly, and in the ultimate codification of Roman law the edicta of the Prætor Peregrinus, the head of the foreign tribunal, play a part second only to the native statutory and casuistic legislation. When the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council sits to hear appeals from Malabar or Benares, from Borneo or Bombay, from French Canada or Hongkong, appeals in which the strangest and most archaic systems of legislation may be involved, we have the nearest modern analogue to the jurisdiction of the Prætor Peregrinus. And as the lawgiving genius of Rome incorporated and harmonised the customary wisdom of the then known world, so when the system of our law is completed, side by side with the Teutonic groundwork, with the Roman additions, may be found elements derived from races world-divided in their range and their social conceptions.
I have, it may be, suffered myself to pursue too long a train of thought suggested by the addresses I have previously delivered. I may seem to have forgotten that ours is an historical science, and that its aim is to make intelligible the origin and growth of past phenomena. It may be an error, but I cannot hold that it derogates from the scholarly nature of our study to note that it has implica-
- ↑ I am glad to find myself in undesigned accord with our present President. My friend Mr. Hartland, in an address delivered two years ago before the Gloucester Philosophical Society, and which he only recently sent me, speaking of the practical value of Folklore, insists likewise upon the positive advantage which the legislator may derive from knowledge of archaic institutions.
