The experience of an abuse, from which our own age and
country are not perfectly exempt, may sometimes provoke a generous
indignation, and extort the hasty wish of exchanging our elaborate
jurisprudence for the simple and summary decrees of a Turkish cadi. Our
calmer reflection will suggest that such forms and delays are necessary
to guard the person and property of the citizen; that the discretion of
the judge is the first engine of tyranny, and that the laws of a free
people should foresee and determine every question that may probably
arise in the exercise of power and the transactions of industry. But the
government of Justinian united the evils of liberty and servitude; and
the Romans were oppressed at the same time by the multiplicity of their
laws and the arbitrary will of their master.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Among the works which have been recovered, by the persevering and
successful endeavors of M. Mai and his followers to trace the
imperfectly erased characters of the ancient writers on these
palimpsests, Gibbon at this period of his labors would have hailed with
delight the recovery of the _Institutes_ of Gaius, and the fragments of
the Theodosian _Code_, published by M.
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