According to these principles, the role of public administration is to apply the law » that is, a set of rather abstract general principles that have been written into statute law by the legislature (parliament) - to individual cases. It should be remembered that throughout Europe, including the British Isles, little distinction was made until the seventeenth or eighteenth century between administration and justice as a function, and that applied equally to staffing. The Swedish system of independent administrative agencies has long been an illustration of this lack of differentiation in function.”' The same holds true for the Prussian system of career civil service. The separation of judicial and administrative functions had a dominant role in the development of a modern administration, especially in the case of Spain during the sixteenth and France during the seventeenth centuries.