In so far as the political ideas of antiquity were preserved to modern times otherwise than in the manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle, the influence which preserved them was that of Roman Jurisprudence. The Roman rule, though it stereotyped the state of things in which genuine political function and the spur of freedom were unknown, had one peculiar gift by which it handed to posterity the germs of a great conception of human life. This is not the place to describe at length the origin of that vast practical induction from the working of the “foreigners’ court” at Rome which obtained for itself the name of the Law of Nations, and which, as tinged with ideal theory, was known as the Law of Nature. Whatever fallacies may be near at hand when “natural right” is named, the conception that there is in man, as such, something which must be respected, a law of life which is his “nature,” being indeed another name {11} for his reason, and in some sense or other a “freedom” and an “equality” which are his birthright--this conception was not merely a legacy from Stoic ideas, which had almost a religious inspiration, but was solidly founded on the judicial experience of the most practical race that the world has ever seen. 4. In order that the forces which lay hidden in the conception of Natural Right and Freedom, like the powers of vegetation in a seed, might unfold themselves in the modern world, it was necessary that conditions should recur analogous to those which had first elicited them. And these earlier conditions were those of the Greek City-state; for it was here, as we have seen, that the conception of man’s nature had flourished, as the idea of a purposive evolution into a full and many-sided social life, while in Stoic philosophy and Roman juristic theory it had become more and more a shibboleth and a formula which lost in depth of meaning what it gained in range of application.