The Roman Law of To-day
were ingenuous enough to believe could not be ignored in any body of laws in the world. (“Vim vi repellere omnes leges omniaque jura permittunt.”) They might have been convinced of the contrary in the last century, and even in our own. The learned gentlemen, indeed, admitted this right in principle, but feeling for the criminal the same sympathy felt by the jurists of the civil law and its mode of procedure for the debtor, they endeavored in practice to limit and curtail it, in such a manner that they protected the guilty and left the person attacked unprotected. What a deep abyss of the degeneration of the feeling of personality, of unmanliness, of the decay and bluntness of the sentiment of legal right opens before us, when we descend into the literature of this theory! We might almost imagine ourselves in the company of a set of chaste, emasculated men. The man whose life or honor is threatened, we are told, should retire or take flight—that is, yield the field to injustice—and these sages disagreed only on one question: whether officers, nobles and
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