stablished
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. Alike in the Middle Ages, and since their close, it has been
the subject of speculation and an influence guiding the legislator, the
thinker, and the administrator of law. There is a whole literature upon
it on the Continent. It bulks pretty largely in Blackstone: you can see
its influence on the judges of the eighteenth century in this country;
the founders of the American Republic put a good deal of it into their
constitution, and American judges will still refer to it without shame.
What it really means is a standard by which the law here and now may be
judged, a standard founded on the needs of human nature. That the
standard becomes a different one, as the needs and possibilities of
humanity develop, has not prevented the seeking after such a standard.

It is perhaps only another way of putting the same thing to say that law
has developed and is developing constantly by reference to the pursuit
of ends more or less consciously arrived at by mankind. So far as these
ends are common, and I take it that in the main, amid national and
individual diversity and conflict they are common ends, law has been
formed for their attainment. On the whole what men have asked law to do
f