ABSTRACT
For Henry Sumner Maine, the means toward the end of Progress was Empire: an unsurprising conclusion, perhaps, for a Victorian Englishman. He regarded Ancient Law as an attempt to supply the defects of previous studies and to increase knowledge of the internal mechanics of progressive societies. In Ancient Law, the Roman legal code emerges as the linchpin to the development of progressive societies in the West. Roman law became both midwife and nurse to the new intellectuals of the West, and left an indelible mark on their birth and development, especially on the ultimate subject of theology. The importance of Roman law as a vehicle of progress thus extended beyond the transmission of Roman law from the great, old Empire to the young Germanic nations which replaced it in the Western world. All nations who are ruled by laws and customs, are governed partly by their own particular laws, and partly by those laws which are common to all mankind.
