“The history of all institutions has a deep value and an abiding interest to all those who have the courage to work upon it. It presents in every branch a regularly developed series of causes and consequences, and abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realization of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past; and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.” So Stubbs wrote on finishing his history of the _English Constitution_ and on sending it out to the public. What he has said when thinking of the beginnings of constitutional government in England is true in a higher degree of the relations of modern political institutions to those of Rome. This is the case partly because we owe to Rome so much of our political philosophy and so much of our political system. It is true partly because our indebtedness to Rome in the field of politics has not been appreciated, and consequently we have failed to understand the origin and nature of many of our institutions. The failure to recognize the great debt which we owe to her was a natural oversight. The great gulf of the Middle Ages lies between Roman times and our own day. Until the trend of political thought and the development of society during that period came to be better understood, the close relation which medieval political theory and practice bore to that of the Romans and our dependence on the medieval were not seen. Until very recently students of modern political institutions rarely carried their investigations beyond the limits of their respective countries, or at the most they did not go back beyond the Renaissance. But as the Carlyles have said in their _History of Mediaeval Political Theory_: “From the lawyers of the second century to the theorists of the French Revolution, the history of political thought is continuous, changing in form, modified in content, but still the same in its fundamental conceptions.” Many writers on political science in ignorance or in disregard of this continuity tell us, for instance, that the representative principle was unknown in antiquity, or that the jury system was of English or Scandinavian origin. But fortunately a few scholars, like Bryce, who have an acquaintance with classical institutions, are gradually correcting these errors and helping us to see the way in which many of our modern political theories and institutions have come to us from Rome.