“The history of all institutions has a deep value and an abiding interest to all those who have the courage to work upon it. It presents in every branch a regularly developed series of causes and consequences, and abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realization of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past; and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.” So Stubbs wrote on finishing his history of the English Constitution and on sending it out to the public. What he has said when thinking of the beginnings of constitutional government in England is true in a higher degree of the relations of modern political institutions to those of Rome. This is the case partly because we owe to Rome so much of our political philosophy and so much of our political system. It is true partly because our indebtedness to Rome in the field of politics has not been appreciated, and consequently we have failed to understand the origin and nature of many of our institutions. The failure to recognize the great debt which we owe to her was a natural oversight. The great gulf of the Middle Ages lies between Roman times and our own day. Until the trend of political thought and the development of society during that period came to be better understood, the close relation which medieval political theory and practice bore to that of the Romans and our dependence on the medieval were not seen. Until very recently students of modern political institutions rarely carried their investigations beyond the limits of their respective countries, or at the most they did not go back beyond the Renaissance. But as the Carlyles have said in their History of Mediaeval Political Theory: “From the lawyers of the second century to the theorists of the French Revolution, the history of political thought is continuous, changing in form, modified in content, but still the same in its fundamental conceptions.” Many writers on political science in ignorance or in disregard of this continuity tell us, for instance, that the representative principle was unknown in antiquity, or that the jury system was of English or Scandinavian origin. But fortunately a few scholars, like Bryce, who have an acquaintance with classical institutions, are gradually correcting these errors and helping us to see the way in which many of our modern political theories and institutions have come to us from Rome.
Our political indebtedness to the Romans takes two different forms. We have inherited many theories and institutions from them, and in the second place we have before us for our guidance their experience in dealing with difficult practical problems. As we have noticed in the preceding chapters, they have taught us to study actual governmental systems rather than to attempt the construction of Utopias. We owe to them the fruitful suggestion that the state may be compared to an organism. The conception of the brotherhood of man goes back to the early Empire, and out of this conception international law, and its counterpart, civil law, have developed. Roman writers recognized the three forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and pointed out the importance of dividing the functions of government between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. From them we have derived our accepted doctrine of popular sovereignty, and to them the theory of the divine right of kings may be traced. The Romans developed the distinction which is so vital in English common law between statutes and customs, officially recognized, and showed the great advantages inherent in a flexible constitution which is made up of these two elements. They have handed down to us the representative principle, the jury method of trial, civil law, a clear conception of the rights of a citizen, a jealous regard for law and tradition, a comprehensive system of political checks and balances, model systems of local government and civil service, and methods of governing, civilizing, and unifying alien peoples which have never been equalled.
It was this final contribution that Rome made to civilization of which Mommsen was thinking, toward the end of his long study of Roman history and institutions, when he wrote: “If an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove to be in favor of the present.”