The Spirit of the Roman Law.

historical development of the national life takes place, it must necessarily include the legal life as an integrating factor. Like every nation, every epoch must have its dis tinctive laws. Only, here we must remem ber that the law as a fixed social order with its lasting institutions, does not participate in every oscillation of popular life and change in intellectual attitude, but very often accom modates itself only to the changes of condi tion when they are actually accomplished and very often opposes to them a tenacious resistance. In this case, law may justify the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's "Faust": Es erben sich Gesetz und Rechte Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort; Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte, Und rucken sacht von Ort zu Ort.

But at length the dead system must col lapse. On the other hand, the law may be in advance of the national life, as when the legislation recognizes the directions and needs of the time and shapes the law accordingly. Every actual law therefore is the result of the past and only to be recognized by it, but it also includes more or less of the germs of the future. The history of the law among the different nations in this manner forms a part of their history especially of the history of culture, and as the history of the various nations forms a universal history, so does the history of law among these peoples produce a universal history of law. From the above outlined ethnologic-histor ical conception of law, we may conclude that the differences and changes in the legal life of nations do not arise from the capricious play of chance, but that they are founded in an inner natural necessity. It is a naive child ish belief that law is made by kings and that they change it according to their pleasure. The individual, even the ruler, is a child of his people and of his time and cannot break through the barriers thus set to him. The higher or lower level of development occupied

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by a people, and the rising and sinking of its intellectual power are functions of relations and circumstances entirely beyond the con trol of individual man. The freedom of action and legislation, their merit or guilt, is not thereby annulled; and as little can the idea of necessity or compulsion be violated in or der to influence the judgment of worth or worthlessness of existing institutions and to limit the endeavor for their change or re moval. The border line between freedom and compulsion and how far the individual is acting or compelled, is hammer or anvil, can be as little indicated in the formation of law as in other human actions. Another question is, whether the legal evo lution of individual nations and the different levels thereby attained, is to be regarded as a connected historical development of the law — or rather of the spirit of the law — in which the necessary lower steps for the next higher step is formed by every people; or whether the law in its development is not to be regarded as a collection of more or less prominent phenomena of human character, ripe or unripe fruits of the human intellect. The former view is that held by Hegel, and we are indebted to it for the first general points of view for a conception of the differ ent legal systems. On the other hand, the differences in law is not explained by a mere game of chance. It is the consciousness of right which shows itself in them, its elements furnish the base for the various legal forma tions, and only the one-sided predominance of one or the other clement in the idea of right produces the main differences in legal systems. Thus far a definite principle and system is at the base of the various phenomena in history. The individual, popular legal systems, while they are but slightly connected in their historical development, are logically in definite relations to each other, and the universal history of law. is not a mere regis tering and enumeration of endless varieties of an idea, but it is the representation of the evolution and development of the legal con