customs; yet it served more than merely national purposes, for it found its way not only into the countries conquered by him, where it survived his conquests, but even into lands where he never held sway.  Our French fellow-citizens in Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law.  It took longer before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law.  The very strength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleon stood for a time in the way of codification.  The great German lawyer of that time, Savigny, thought of national law as a half-unconscious product of the national feeling of right.  The Code of Napoleon had been a revolutionary code, founded (imperfectly, no doubt) on the doctrines of the rights of man; codification for Germany would mean the adoption of something abstract, not specifically national.  It was only a century of extraordinary fruitful learned activity, bringing with it at the same time a new and intense study of the Roman law, and a revival of the knowledge and application of the native conceptions of law, that made possible the German civil code which came into force fifteen years ago.

England has never seriously undertaken the work of codification, and its law, uniform and national already in the Middle Ages, has become in the modern world something far wider than a merely national law.  The English settlers in the new world brought their law with them.  To-day English law, modified no doubt by State and Federal legislation, is the Common Law of the great republic of the United States.  The colonies which still remain within our Empire are territories of the English law, save where, as in South Africa or Quebec, civilized settlers had already established and retained their own law.  Throughout these lands, it matters little under which flag, an English lawyer finds the Courts speaking a language which he understands.

Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization from Western Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and lands where in outward form at least the law is Roman.  And yet we must not make too much of this division.  In the first place it cuts across national boundaries.  It unites us with the United States of America, it separates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them with continental Europe.  In the second place law is, like language, a form of thought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent a unity of substance.

Among the forces which have made for unity something should be said of the conception of a law of nature.  The phrase has been out of fashion in this country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress upon the positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law which they would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word.  I am not concerned here to discuss its philosophical validity.  But it has never been lost sight of.  It is one of the inheritances of the Roman law tradition.