It is not strange, therefore, that we find ancient Rome reappearing in one of the most important juridical institutions of the United States, an institution which we should search for in vain in Europe, great mistress of laws though she be accounted. One of the American institutions which seems to Europeans most contrary to the modern spirit, and for that reason most deserving of severe blame, is the right of “injunctions” with which American magistrates are invested. To Europe, where the bureaucracy, though immovable and little subject to control, cannot step outside the precise prescriptions of the law in the exercise of its functions, this discretionary power of the American magistrates seems little less than an instrument of intolerable tyranny. A brilliant European, who is a distinguished professor of literature in one of the universities of North America, but who, notwithstanding a very lengthy sojourn in the American republic, has preserved intact the ideas and the spirit of the Old World, said to me one day in New York: “In this land of liberty, there is one tyranny more terrible than all the tyrannies of Europe, that of the judicial power!” That a magistrate should have the power to give orders, be they of only momentary validity, which are the expressions of his own will and not of the letter of the law, seems to the European a monstrous thing, a relic of the ancient tyrannies, which harmonises but ill with republican institutions. A historian of the ancient world, on the other hand, is in a position to understand more easily this seeming contradiction. The injunction is nothing else than the _edictum_ of the Roman magistrate; the power, that is to say, which the Roman magistrate possessed, and which the American magistrate, maybe in a less degree, possesses, of making good with his personal authority the lacunæ and deficiencies in the law, on every occasion when public order or the principles of justice seemed to demand it urgently. In the eyes of ancient Rome, the magistrate was not only, as in the bureaucratic states of Europe, the cautious and impartial servant and executor of the law. He was also the living personification of the State and of the general interest, invested with full powers of exercising his own judgment, over and above the laws, on behalf of the State and of the general interest, when the law was found wanting. In short, by reinforcing the authority of the magistrates, the ancient states endeavoured to make amends for the weakening of the State which was bound to ensue from the continual electoral changes and the instability of all the offices; while Europe, on the other hand, which, with her rigid bureaucracies, has made the power of the State so strong, can rigorously limit the powers of her functionaries with laws of immense scope. But one last remnant of the ancient conception, tempered by the modern spirit of the State, survives in North America,