opinion, restraints of which the stringency can only be appreciated by
those who have personally experienced them. It may be added that the
lines within which movement is permitted, and beyond which there is to
be no travelling, were chalked with as much distinctness in the one
case as in the other. In England the judge follows the analogies of
reported decisions on insulated groups of facts. At Rome, as the
intervention of the Praetor was at first dictated by simple concern for
the safety of the state, it is likely that in the earliest times it
was proportioned to the difficulty which it attempted to get rid of.
Afterwards, when the taste for principle had been diffused by the
Responses, he no doubt used the Edict as the means of giving a wider
application to those fundamental principles, which he and the other
practising jurisconsults, his contemporaries, believed themselves
to have detected underlying the law. Latterly he acted wholly under
the influence of Greek philosophical theories, which at once tempted
him to advance and confined him to a particular course of progress.
The nature of the measures attributed to Salvius Julianus has been
much disputed. Whatever they were, their effects on the Edict are
sufficiently plain. It ceased to be extended by annual additions, and
henceforward the equity jurisprudence of Rome was developed by the
labours of a succession of great jurisconsults who fill with their
writings the interval between the reign of Hadrian and the reign of
Alexander Severus. A fragment of the wonderful system which they built
up survives in the Pandects of Justinian, and supplies evidence that
their works took the form of treatises on all parts of Roman Law, but
chiefly that of commentaries on the Edict. Indeed, whatever be the
immediate subject of a jurisconsult of this epoch, he may always be
called an expositor of Equity. The principles of the Edict had, before
the epoch of its cessation, made their way into every part of Roman
jurisprudence. The Equity of Rome, it should be understood, even when
most distinct from the Civil Law, was always administered by the same
tribunals. The Praetor was the chief equity judge as well as the great
common law magistrate, and as soon as the Edict had evolved an
equitable rule the Praetor's court began to apply it in place of or by
the side of the old rule of the Civil Law, which was thus directly or
indirectly repealed without any express enactment of the legislature.
The result, of course, fell considerably short of a complete fusion of
law and equity, which was not carried out till the reforms of
Justinian. The technical severance of the two elements of
jurisprudence entailed some confusion and some inconvenience, and
there were certain of the stubborner doctrines of the Civil Law with
which neither the authors nor the expositors of the Edict had ventured
to interfere. But at the same time there was no corner of the field of
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