Principles of western civilisation

172 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the identity of the idea, which prompted the attitude of contempt for those outside the bond of citizenship, with the fundamental conception of Ancestor Worship — citizenship founded on exclusive religious community of blood by descent—is unmistakable. In the legal codes of the ancient world, as Sohm points out, the resulting fact of the antithesis of mutually exclusive States was an inherent and fundamental principle." Much has been written in a superficial spirit respecting the liberal and tolerant ideas which prevailed in the later period at which the spread of Roman conquest had brought the Roman rule into contact with a multitude of foreign peoples; when, to use words of Sandars, Rome was engaged in “connecting herself with her subject allies by conceding them privileges proportionate to their importance or their services ” ; and? when the zus Latinum, the zus ILtalicumz, and last of all, the zws gentium, were already amplifying, modifying, and evading the stern exclusive spirit of the original zs czvzde. But the evolutionist sees how brief in the life-history of a world-process, which had already passed its climax, are these phenomena, and how they represent, not a process of life at all, but one of decay. It was with the spirit of the zs czvzle that the life-principle of the military civilisation of Rome was associated. The later spirit had not only no power to stay the ebbing vitality of the Roman empire, but it was itself in one sense the very symbol of the causes which were producing it. In an eloquent passage of the

! The Institutes of Roman Law, by Rudolph Sohm (Ledlie), pp. 116, 117. 2 The Institutes of Justinian (Sandars),