The impatience of the prince, the prelate, the noble, and the wealthy burgher at the restraints which the system of the Middle Ages placed upon his activity as an individual in the acquisition for his own behoof, and the disposal at his own pleasure, of wealth, regardless of the consequences to his neighbour, found expression, and a powerful lever, in the introduction from Italy of the Roman law in place of the old canon and customary law of Europe. The latter never regarded the individual as an independent and autonomous entity, but invariably treated him with reference to a group or social body, of which he might be the head or merely a subordinate member; but in any case the filaments of custom and religious duty attached him to a certain humanity outside himself, whether it were a village community, a guild, a township, a province, or the empire. The idea of a right to individual autonomy in his dealings with men never entered into the mediaeval man's conception. Hence the mere possession of property was not recognized by mediaeval law as conferring any absolute rights in its holder to its unregulated use, and the basis of the mediaeval notions of property was the association of responsibility and duty with ownership. In other words, the notion of _trust_ was never completely divorced from that of _possession_. The Roman law rested on a totally different basis. It represented the legal ethics of a society on most of its sides brutally and crassly individualistic. That that society had come to an end instead of evolving to its natural conclusion--a developed capitalistic individualism such as exists to-day--was due to the weakness of its economic basis, owing to the limitation at that time of man's power over Nature, which deprived it of recuperative and defensive force, thereby leaving it a prey not only to internal influences of decay but also to violent destructive forces from without. Nevertheless, it left a legacy of a ready-made legal system to serve as an implement for the first occasion when economic conditions should be once more ready for progress to resume the course of individualistic development, abruptly brought to an end by the fall of ancient civilization as crystallized in the Roman Empire.