Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/189

just as in commercial states at the present day the universal right to draw bills of exchange appears in conjunction with a strict procedure in regard to them. The burgess and the client stood in their dealings on a footing of entire equality; state treaties conceded a comprehensive equality of rights also to the guest; women were placed completely on a level in point of legal capacity with men, although restricted in administering their property; the boy had scarcely grown up when he received at once the most comprehensive powers in the disposal of his property, and one who had at all the power of disposal was in his own sphere as sovereign as was in its public province the state. A feature eminently characteristic was the system of credit. There did not exist any credit on landed security, but instead of a debt on mortgage the step which constitutes at present the final stage in mortgage-procedure, the delivery of the property from the debtor to the creditor, took place at once. On the other hand, personal credit was guaranteed in the most summary and extravagant fashion, for the law entitled the creditor to treat his insolvent debtor like a thief, and granted to him in sober earnest by legislative enactment what Shylock, half in jest, stipulated for from his mortal enemy, guarding indeed by special clauses the point as to cutting off too much more carefully than did the Jew. The law could not have more clearly expressed its design, which was to establish at once an independent agriculture free of debt and a mercantile credit, and to suppress with stringent energy all merely nominal ownership and all breaches of fidelity. If we further take into consideration the right of settlement recognized at an early date as belonging to all the Latins (P. 111), and the validity which was likewise early pronounced to belong to civil marriage (P. 93), we shall perceive that this state, which made the highest demands on its burgesses and carried the idea of subordinating the individual to the interest of the whole further than any state before or since has done, only did and only could do so, by itself removing the barriers to intercourse and unshackling liberty quite as much as it subjected it to restriction. In permission or in prohibition tho law was always absolute. As the foreigner who had none to intercede for him was like a baited stag, so the guest was on a footing of equality with the burgess. A contract did not ordinarily constitute a ground of action, but where the right of the creditor was acknowledged, it was so all-powerful