hether it is a High Court of Parliament or an
absolute monarch which is the supreme authority: law comes to be thought
of as the command of a sovereign person or assembly. 'No law', we are
told, 'can be unjust', for law is the standard of justice, and there is
no other standard by which the justice of law can be measured. The fact
that there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmake
the law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law for
all the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with the
nation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law. Thus
Frederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France a
code which swept away the diversities of the provincial 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 e