The fact that there was no organized and officially recognized body of men to plead in the law courts caused little inconvenience in private cases. A man who defended the interests of a friend, or brought an action in his name, was not in an invidious position, even though by well known evasions of the law he received a consideration for his friendly services. Again so long as the senatorial constitution existed, the prosecution of offenders against the State was an honourable public duty, and young men took their first step in a political career by conducting a State prosecution or defending the delinquent. Such prosecutions were political rather than legal; they were episodes in a never-ending party struggle; they resembled the impeachments and attainders of our own parliamentary history. The introduction of the monarch into the Roman Constitution created a state of affairs for which the Constitution had not provided; the position of the head of the Government was not defined; it was only gradually and by a slow process of development that his person and his good name were protected from attack. We do not possess the text of the Julian laws passed in the reign of Augustus, whose object was in part to protect the first person in the State, and to make offences against his person and reputation offences against the majesty of the State; but we know enough of their nature to be certain that Augustus with all his wisdom found an unhappy solution of a real difficulty. The Roman Republic was not provided with a Public Prosecutor, nor with law officers of the Crown, nor could Augustus be provided with such protectors; he could neither through his agents nor in person bring actions against offenders under the “Lex Majestatis,” for in such a case the verdict was a foregone conclusion. In order, therefore, that such cases should be spontaneously brought before the courts, it was enacted that the prosecutor, if successful, should receive all or part of the fine. Men were thus tempted not only to get up cases, but to provide that the evidence should lead to a confiscation of the goods of the defendant; the greater the penalty, the greater the reward of the prosecutor. Speculations in promoting conspiracy and then informing were the natural result. It is easy at this distance of time to condemn the system, and easier still to forget the long growth of habits and prescriptions which have rendered trials for treason and constructive treason and for libelling the Sovereign almost obsolete in our own country. In our happy ignorance of the conditions which made such processes possible and necessary we may be tempted to ask with surprise why Tiberius, if he were really a wise and moderate man, did not abolish or amend the “Lex Majestatis.” The hostile writers Tacitus and Suetonius tell us repeatedly that Tiberius never made use of this law, or of any law, as a means of filling his treasury. The examples of