By requiring pecuniary independence and social position, together with a certain amount of learning and of personal character, the tone of the upper courts was kept good, the magistrates being generally among the most learned, solid, and respectable men in France. They seem also to have been hard-working and honest, although prejudiced in favor of their own privileged class. As the Revolution drew near, they fell into the common weakness of their age and country, the worship of public opinion, and the love of popularity. We find the Parliament of Paris undergoing, and even courting, the applause of the mob in its own halls of justice. Like the great Assembly which was soon to have in its hands the destinies of France, the most dignified court of justice in the land failed to perceive that the deliberative body that allows itself to be influenced or even interrupted by spectators, will soon, and deservedly, lose respect and power.[Footnote: De Tocqueville praises the independence of the old magistrates, who could neither be degraded nor promoted by the government, Oeuvres, iv. 171 (Ancien Régime, ch. xi.). Montesquieu, iii. 217 (Esp. des lois, liv. v. ch. xix.). Mirabeau, L'Ami des hommes, 212, 219. Bastard d'Estang, ii. 611, 621. Grimm, xi. 314.] When we pass from the consideration of the political functions of the Parliaments, and of their composition, to that of the ordinary administration of justice, we are struck by the diversity of the law in civil matters, and by its severity in criminal affairs. The kingdom of France, as it existed in the eighteenth century, was made up of many provinces and cities, various in their history. Each one had its local customs and privileges. The complication of rules of procedure and rights of property was almost infinite. The body of the law was derived from sources of two distinct kinds, from feudal custom and from Roman jurisprudence. The customs which arose, or were first noted, in the Middle Ages, originating as, they did in the manners of barbarian tribes, or in the exigencies of a rude state of society, were products of a less civilized condition of the human mind than the laws of Rome. From a very early period, therefore, the most intelligent and educated lawyers all over Europe were struggling, more or less consciously, to bring customary feudal law into conformity with Roman ideas. These legists recognized that in many matters the custom had definitely fixed the law; but whenever a doubtful question arose, they looked for guidance to the more perfect system. "The Roman law," they said, "is observed everywhere, not by reason of its authority, but by the authority of reason." This idea was peculiarly congenial to the tone of thought current in the eighteenth century.