In an expanding community the actual facts of the administration are seldom in exact correspondence with the forms; apparent rigidity, real elasticity, enable business to be carried on in accordance with the claims of new social factors without any sense of insecurity. The Roman, like the Englishman, preferred making new laws to repealing old ones; and when he made a fresh departure, he was at pains to represent it as a development of something by which it had been preceded; in both cases this profound respect for the historical aspect of law has been the foundation of national greatness; it has been extended beyond the races in which it originated, and in the case of England, as in that of Rome, has resulted in an exceptionally successful government of alien communities; laws and customs which are sanctified by immemorial usage appeal to the sympathy of the Englishman and command his respect; it was the same with the Roman. England has had her periods of aberration when she has given way to the proselytizing tendencies of sections of her population, but the broad lines of her policy in dealing with subject nationalities have followed the principle of accepting the existing conditions; in the same way Rome accepted the laws and customs of the Eastern Mediterranean and of Western Europe; she supplied a common law for her Empire, which applied where the local law had no application; its excellence was such that it became predominant, but she did not insist on remodelling every community over which she held supreme power in terms of her own constitution. This respect for antiquity and adherence to established forms has resulted in a misrepresentation of some of the facts of Roman constitutional development, and especially of those which concern the development of the Empire, which is in the highest degree embarrassing to the student of the period in which the change took place. There was a time when the constitution of Rome and her political history differed little from that of any other city state of antiquity, but it would not be easy to state when that period began or ended; of one thing we may be quite certain, viz., that after the destruction of Carthage and the completion of the first great period of conquest in the Eastern Mediterranean in 145 B.C., the political life of the city of Rome was no longer comparable to that of any other city state; the forms remained, and the faith in the forms remained, but the substance was gone. There is for instance no term so misleading as one which was seldom out of the mouth of Cicero, “the Roman people”; there unquestionably was a time when the Roman people was an organized part of the Roman constitution, when it voted in an orderly fashion according to a property qualification for the election of certain magistrates, and the ratification of certain laws; when it voted according to a residential organization for the election of other magistrates, and to pass other laws; but the forms of popular