to decide points of law, than the assembly itself. In England the House
of Lords still, formally at least, retains judicial functions. Acts of
attainder were a yet more primitive as well as more objectionable relic
of the times in which the sovereign power, whether king, assembly, or
the two combined, was ruler, legislator, and judge all in one. We shall
not attempt here to trace the process by which this momentous separation
of powers and functions was to a remarkable extent accomplished in
ancient Rome. But we are pretty safe in saying that the _praetor
peregrinus_ was an important figure in it, and that it received a
considerable impulse from the exigencies of a jurisdiction between those
who as citizens came under the sovereign assembly and the aliens or
semi-aliens who did not.

Whether the partial explanations of the mystery of Roman greatness which
we have here suggested approve themselves to the reader's judgment or
not, it may at least be said for them that they are _verae causae_,
which is not the case with the story of the foster-wolf, or anything
derived from it, any more than with the story of the prophetic
apparitions of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.

With regard to the public morality of the Romans, and to their conduct
and influence as masters of the world, the language of historians seems
to us to leave something to be desired. Mommsen's tone, whenever
controverted questions connected with international morality and the law
of conquest arise, is affected by his Prussianism; it betokens the
transition of the German mind from the speculative and visionary to the
practical and even more than practical state; it is premonitory not only
of the wars with Austria and France, but of a coming age in which the
forces of natural selection are again to operate without the restraints
imposed by religion, and the heaviest fist is once more to make the law.