of similarity between Roman and Anglo-Saxon fundamental laws lies in the fact that both are concrete, and concern themselves little with political doctrines. Both peoples drove straight at specific abuses, without citing any principles of abstract right in justification of the proposed reform. In one respect Roman government differed fundamentally from that of most modern states. The three functions of government which Montesquieu clearly recognized, the executive, legislative, and judicial, were not assigned to three different classes of officials with as much care as they are today. Of course this lack of differentiation is more noticeable in the early period than it is in the later, but it persists even into the Empire. The Senate, for instance, under the Empire not only legislated, but it nominally had the right to elect the Emperor and the magistrates, and also sat as a court to hear political charges made against members of the senatorial order. Although the threefold division of governmental powers was observed then only in part in the actual organization of the Roman state, it was recognized by Aristotle and by Cicero in their works on politics. The Greco-Roman doctrine on this subject was reaffirmed by Bodin and Locke, as Garner has pointed out in his _Introduction to Political Science_, before it was set forth as a fundamental principle of political organization in the _Spirit of the Laws_. The teachings of Montesquieu on this point became a part of the political philosophy of the French Revolution. In England Blackstone maintained, as Montesquieu had done, that there could be no public liberty when the right of making and enforcing the law was vested in the same man or the same body of men, or when the judicial power was not separated from the legislative and executive. The makers of the Constitution of the United States were profoundly influenced by Montesquieu and Blackstone, and probably no modern constitution exemplifies so well as does the American constitution the threefold division of powers recognized by Cicero. As the Supreme Court has said in one of its decisions: “It is believed to be one of the chief merits of the American system of written constitutional law that all powers entrusted to the government, whether state or national, are divided into three grand departments, the executive, the legislative and the judicial; that the functions appropriate to each of these branches of government shall be vested in a separate body of public servants, and that the perfection of the system requires that the lines which separate and divide these departments shall be broadly and clearly defined.”