In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire, propugnacula imperii. Political depletion and provision for needy citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at least, secondary objects. Such outposts were the means suggested by Nature, first of securing those parts of the plain which were beyond the sheltering range of the city itself, secondly of guarding the outlets of the hills against the hill tribes, and eventually of holding down the tribes in the hills themselves. The custody of the passes is especially marked as an object by the position of many of the early colonies. When the Roman dominion extended to the north of Italy, the same system was pursued, in order to guard against incursions from the Alps. A conquering despot would have planted mere garrisons under military governors, which would not have been centres of civilization, but probably of the reverse. The Roman colonies, bearing onwards with them the civil as well as the military life of the Republic, were, with the general system of provincial municipalities of which they constituted the core, to no small extent centres of civilization, though doubtless they were also to some extent instruments of oppression. "Where the Roman conquered he dwelt," and the dwelling of the Roman was, on the whole, the abode of a civilizing influence. Representation of dependencies in the sovereign assembly of the imperial country was unknown, and would have been impracticable. Conquest had not so far put off its iron nature. In giving her dependencies municipal institutions and municipal life, Rome did the next best thing to giving them representation. A Roman province with its municipal life was far above a satrapy, though far below a nation.
Then how came Rome to be the foundress and the great source of law? This, as we said before, calls for a separate explanation. An explanation we do not pretend to give, but merely a hint which may deserve notice in looking for the explanation. In primitive society, in place of law, in the proper sense of the term, we find only tribal custom, formed mainly by the special exigencies of tribal self- preservation, and confined to the particular tribe. When Saxon and Dane settle down in England side by side under the treaty made between Alfred and Guthurm, each race retains the tribal custom which serves it as a criminal law. A special effort seems to be required in order to rise above this custom to that conception of general right or expediency which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now what conditions would be most favourable to this critical effort, so fraught with momentous consequences to humanity? Apparently a union of elements belonging to different tribes such as would compel them, for the preservation of peace and the regulation of daily intercourse, to adopt some common measure of right. It must be a union, not a conquest of one tribe by another, otherwise the conquering tribe would of course keep its own customs, as the Spartans did among the conquered people of Laconia. Now it appears likely that these conditions were exactly fulfilled by the primaeval settlements on the hills of Rome. The hills are either escarped by nature or capable of easy escarpment, and seem originally to have been little separate fortresses, by the union of which the city was ultimately formed. That there were tribal differences among the inhabitants of the different hills is a belief to which all traditions and all the evidence of institutions point, whether we suppose the difference to have been great or not and whatever special theory we may form as to the origin of the Roman people. If the germ of law, as distinguished from custom, was brought into existence in this manner, it would be fostered and expanded by the legislative exigencies of the political and social concordat between the two orders, and also by those arising out of the adjustment of relations with other races in the course of conquest and colonization.
Roman law had also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue, fall under the head rather of trickery than of superstition.
Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of the tribe.
A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the Roman religion—the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna, Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus—even looks like a product of the intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities which were left—hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men of the world—were worse than worthless in a religious point of view. But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism, had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an effort of speculative intellect, which in an early stage of society would be out of the question, but to some happy conjunction of circumstances such as would be presented by a break-up of tribal mythologies, combined with influences favourable to the formation of strong habits of political and social duty. Religious art was sacrificed; that was the exclusive heritage of the Greek; but superior morality was on the whole the heritage of the Roman, and if he produced no good tragedy himself, he furnished characters for Shakespeare and Corneille.
Whatever set the Romans free,