Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/70

62 ROMAN LAW Januaiy It was just this impersonality, this detachment, this reliance upon principle, which was absent from other contemporary theorists. Many of these were content to see the monarchy of France, the seat of sovereignty, a prize for the more successful party in a war of wits and arms. So few had that which alone lends nobility to the speculation of political philosophy, the conviction that institutions are instruments for a political or social purpose, not vantage-points to elevate the leaders of faction or hustings for the demagogue. The very Huguenots who after St. Bartholomew applauded the Vindiciae or the Franco-Oallia were, by what one can only in charity call a change of emphasis, those who after the death of AlenQon in 1584 proclaimed most energetically the sanctity of the Salic law. A direct sequence of events again explains the difference in the catholic party's views in 1559 and 1588, between an adherent of the Guises during the reign of Francis II and those of the Seize for the excesses of whom the Guises were, if truth were told, responsible. For both religious parties principles seemed interchangeable, but, if the Roman jurists of the day proved no exception to the rule in their private capacity, it is not manifested in their work, and the dominance of civilization for the third time by the Roman jurisprudence, to which end their work was instrumental, lifted the development of events out of the fashioning of religious controversy. Here join hands the civilians and the politiques, the party which anticipated the modern nation state ; and the new monarchy may be said to trace in part its new-won power to the writings of the Roman lawyers, or, as these notes would indicate a better way of putting it, to the impersonal authority of Roman law. Geoffrey Butler.