and perpetuating the authority u£ the scoundrels who ruled in Rome at that time.
Even the Gospels, while teaching the sublime idea of no revenge for offences, which is the essence of Christianity, speak all the while of a God of Vengeance, and by this means teach vengeance.
At a still later epoch, we find the same again in the codes of the so-called barbarians: the Gauls, the Longobards, the Alemanni, the Saxons, the Slavonians, after the fall of the Roman Empire. These codes legalised a custom, excellent no doubt, which began to spread at that time: that of paying compensation for wounds and murders, instead of practising the previously very general law of retaliation, which said: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blow for blow, and life for life." By so doing, the barbarian codes certainly represented an improvement on the law of blood-revenge, which had been the code of tribe life; but at the same time they also established the division of free men into classes—a distinction which was hardly perceptible yet at the time when law came in to enforce it, but was reinforced by it.
So much compensation—it was said now in the Barbarian codes—has to be paid for a slave (to the master of the slave); so much, much more, for a freeman; and so much, very much more, for a chieftain. Tn this last case the compensation was so high that it meant lifelong slavery for the murderer. Now, the primary idea of these distinctions, established by custom, was no doubt that the family of a chieftain, killed in a brawl, lost by his death far more than the family of an ordinary freeman who would have been killed in the same circumstance; consequently, the first had a right to a higher compensation than the second. But in legalising this custom, the code established a division of men into classes, and so firmly established it that up till now we have not been able to get rid of it.
And the same obtains in all legislation, even in that of our own times—the injustice and oppression that were practised at a particular period being handed down by law to the later periods. The tyranny of the Persian Empire was thus transmitted to Greece, that of Macedonia to Rome; and the oppression and cruelty of the Roman Empire and the Eastern autocracies and theocracies were transmitted to the young barbaric States when they began to be formed, and even to the Christian Church. By means of Law the past fettered the future.
All the guarantees that are necessary to the life of society, all
