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THE RT. HON. JAMES BRYCE And after the inhabitants of the city had ceased to be the heart of the empire this consciousness of greatness passed to the whole population of the Roman world when they compared themselves with the barbarians outside their frontiers. The conquest of India (by the British) was a splendid achievement, more striking and more difficult, if less romantic than the conquest of Mexico by Cortez or the conquest of Peru by Pizarro. Among the English as among the Romans the sense of personal force, the conscious ascen dency of a race so often already victorious, with centuries of fame behind them, and a fine contempt for the feebler folk against whom they were contending, were the main sources of that dash and energy and readiness to face any odds, which bore down all resistance. These qualities have lasted into our own time. No more bril liant examples were ever given of them than in the defence of the fort at Lucknow and in the seige of Delhi at the time of the Indian mutiny of 1857-8. It is by these qualities that the English continue to hold India. In the higher grades of the civil administration which they fill there are only about one thousand persons, and these one thousand control two hundred and eighty-seven millions, doing it with so little friction that they have ceased to be surprised at the extra ordinary fact. The British Raj fills them with a sense of mystery and awe. I heard at Lehore, an anecdote which slight as it is illustrates the way in which the native thinks of these things. A tiger had escaped from the zoological gardens and its keeper hoping to lure it back followed it. When all other inducements had failed he lifted up his voice and solemnly adjured it in the name of the British government to which it belonged to come back to its cage. The tiger obeyed. It reminds us of another story told by W. Haldane. A traveller who had penetrated into a remote part
of India found the natives offering up a sacrifice to a far off but all powerful god who had just restored to the tribe the land which the government of the day had taken from it. He asked the name of the god. The reply was, "We know nothing of him but that he is a good god and that his name is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council." The Nature of Sovereignty, The Relation of Law and Religion, the Law of Nature, the Constitution of the United States as seen in the Past Primitive Iceland are often topics on which Mr. Bryce discourses with the knowledge and insight of an accomplished scholar and man of the world. A curious and strangely interesting picture it is which Mr. Bryce gives us here of Ultima Thale with its little groups of inhabitants scattered along the edges of a barren desert interior of glaciers, precipices and morasses. Its wild blood feuds, its voracity and plunderings, yet united through it all by its judicial "Alpine," one of the oldest national assemblies of the world) a folk court presided over by the "Law-say Man," or speaker of the Law whose duty it was to recite aloud each year the whole of the common law, to rehearse the formulas of actions and to answer all questions which might be put as to the provisions of the law. JUSTINIAN. His article again on Justinian is an instructive account of the great reform associated with that Emperor's name. The law of the Roman empire when Justinian ascended the throne was in a state of great confusion. There was the old law (jus vetus) and there was the new law (jus novum). The old law comprehended (1) the statutes (leges) passed under the republic and early empire; (2) the decisions of the Senate (senatus consulta); and (3) the writings of the jurists, more particularly of those jurists to whom the right of declar ing the law with authority (jus respondendi)
