The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, July 1883

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

Curtius defines the spirit of the Roman as that of the destruction of national peculiarities. Rome conquers the world and educates all nations into the same state of mind as its own people. The people in Spain and Gaul and Britain, in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, as well as in Greece, all become like the people of Italy in this respect, and grow to be very considerate of the boundary line between public and private life.

Out of this isolation of the private life grows the great respect for property and ownership which we find in connection with Roman institutions. The public is not one with the private, but distinguished from it by the Roman idea. But the law defines the limits of each and so they do not conflict.

In private property the citizen finds a sphere wherein he can realize his personal freedom. By means of property man satisfies his wants of food, clothing, and shelter. He is able, by means of property, to gratify a higher spiritual want of amusement and culture. He may avail himself of the observation and reflection of his fellow-men and profit by learning their experience. What our fellow-men have learned by error and suffering, as well as by observation and reflection, go to make up the wisdom of the race, which may be collected, preserved and distributed by means of the institution of private property.

Property is thus something that connects the particular individual with the social whole or the human race. In the sphere of ownership the individual is free and self-determined; he makes and unmakes at pleasure. With property he extends the sphere of his private personality and enters into free alliance with other personalities. By bargain and sale of chattels he exercises his own private freedom, not by limiting the freedom of others, but by and through the equal exercise of freedom on the part of those others. Thus by the invention of the institution of property the private freedom of each individual interpenetrates the sphere of the freedom of others without conflicting with it, but in fact reinforcing it, so that each man is freer through the freedom of others. Such is the wonderful significance of this Roman invention of private right of property.

What we see among other nations in Europe and Asia, before the Roman law came in vogue, is not the completed realization of the idea of private property but only the crude first appearance of it. Property under the Romans is as different from property in Persia, or even in Sparta, as commerce is different from piracy. It is the Roman who eliminates the element of external violence by freeing private rights from absorption in public rights. Then the freedom of one individual comes to reinforce that of another instead of limiting and circumscribing it.

It is one thing to be able to see the universal law in the particular facts and phenomena. It is quite another thing to see the universal forms of the will, rules that all individuals may conform their actions to, and by so doing avoid all conflict and collision of wills. These general forms of actions and deeds, when defined in words, become civil laws. The civil laws define the limits and boundaries within which each and all individuals may act without mutual conflict. If these laws are not obeyed one individual act will neutralize another and both will reduce to zero.

The Roman is able to formulate the general will, and he compiles the code of laws that descends to modern nations as one of the three most precious heir-looms. These laws define the forms in which men may act without contradicting each other, the forms by which the individual may accumulate property and realize his personality, and at the same time help, and not hinder, the personal freedom of all others. The Roman invented the forms by which a city, a town, a state may be governed and justice rendered to all, the forms in which a corporation may exist for the accomplishment of undertakings too great or too long continued for the single individual.

Religion in Rome had the two fold character of public and private. The family had its household gods, its Lares and Penates. The city had its tutelary deities, under various forms and names, but all amounting to the same thing, to wit: the expression of the abstract power of the state. The state was the highest divinity that the Roman knew. The gods Jupiter, Quirinus, Janus, etc., all meant the might of Rome. The deification of abstractions was carried out to a degree of superstitious whimsicality that astonishes us. There was conceived a god or goddess for every process of growth and decay and for every instrumentality of the natural or of the spiritual, and there was a divinity that made the bones grow in the child, and a divinity that assisted the flow of the sewers.

The Roman conception of the divine defined it as some invisible power that could be made useful to the individual or the state by some sacrifice or service performed toward it. The Roman therefore made vows to a particular deity when he found himself in an emergency. If the deity gave him success he fulfilled his vow with the greatest punctiliousness, offering a sacrifice, or founding a temple, or establishing some worship, in return for the service obtained. Thus the principle of contract entered the Roman idea of religion.

Contract is the essential legal basis for the transfer of property in such a manner as to secure joint freedom of individuals. Contract in religion as the relation of the individual to God seems the most terrible of all impiety. But the Roman in effect made contracts with his gods, showing the all-powerful hold of the idea of property and legality over the mind of this nation.