sive forms and the diverse and
ever-changing conditions of labor, property and the family; nothing
which, through the law, exposes to view and brings us in contact with
the social body to which it is applied. That is to say, this or that
active and human group, with its habits, prejudices, instincts, dangers
and necessities; nothing but two dry, rigid codes, like two aerolites
fallen from the sky ready-made and all of a piece at an interval
of fourteen centuries. At first, the Institutes,[6226] "by cutting
out[6227] what is not applicable to our legislation and replacing these
matters by a comparison with much finer laws scattered through other
books of Roman law," similar to the classes in the humanities, where
Latin literature is reduced to the finest passages of the classic
authors. Next, the French code, with the comments on it due to the
decisions of the court of appeals and the court of cassation.[6228] All
the courses of lectures of the school shall be obligatory and arranged
as a whole, or tacked on to each other in a compulsory order; each step
the student takes shall be counted, measured and verified every three
months by a certificate, and each year by an examination; at these
examinations there shall be no optional matters, no estimate of
collateral studies or those of complimentary or superior importance.
The student finds no attraction or benefit in studies outside of
the programme, and, in this programme he finds only official texts,
explained by the bill of fare, one by one, with subtlety, and patched
together as well as may be by means of distinctions and interpretations,
so as to provide the understood solution in ordinary cases and a
plausible solution in disputed cases, in other terms, a system of
casuistry.[6229]

And this is just the education which suits the future practitioner. As
a celebrated professor of the second Empire says,[6230] "our young
graduates need a system of instruction which enables them to pass
without perplexity or discouragement from the school to the halls of
justice;" to have the 2281 articles of the civil code at their fingers'
ends, also the rest, hundreds and thousands of them, of the other four
codes; to find at once in relation to each case the set of pertinent
articles, the general rule, neither too broad nor too narrow, which fits
the particular case in question. As for law taken in itself and as a
whole, they have none of that clear, full conception of it to which a