W e have so far been concerned with the legal clothing which a man wears in life—his rights and duties.

Any system of law must make some provision for the disposal of that clothing when life ends. The provision may indeed be crude.

This part of Roman law is chiefly remarkable in three ways— for its precocious recognition of the dead man’s last will, for the bulk and complexity with which the lawyers endowed it in its maturity, and above all for the rigorous application of the principle on which the whole structure rested, that of universal succession.

Of the early appearance of the will and of its later develop­ment more must be said later. Here it is enough to notice that it was to this institution that the law owed its bulk and com­plexity. A quarter of the Digest, and an even larger proportion of the Institutes, is devoted to succession on death, all but a small fraction being concerned with one aspect or another of the law of wills. Various reasons can be found for this predominance of succession on death. On the one hand there is the lawyers’ robust belief, characteristic of their class and time, in the virtues, indeed the inevitability, of a liberal system of private property, of the right of every man to do as he will with his own. On the other hand, here more than anywhere else one meets the law­yer’s essential conservatism and his reluctance to embark on any extensive systematization or simplification of the law. Old insti­tutions were allowed to survive alongside newer (usually Prae­torian) devices, even though these devices had been introduced precisely because the old institutions were not in keeping with new needs and new values. But duplication of this kind accounts only for part of the complexity of the law. In a developed sys­tem the law of wills is inevitably complicated, as English law shows. Questions of construction and interpretation are as varied as the ingenuity or ineptitude of testators, and these questions give full scope to that delight in details and fine distinctions which was as much a feature of the Roman lawyer’s mind as his reluctance to systematize and to simplify. Our concern here, however, is with the essential framework of this elaborate structure, and first of all with its foundation-stone, the principle of universal succes­sion. (The term itself is modern.)