towards a common industrial code, as it is advancing towards a common commercial code.
Some hundred years after Montesquieu's death another brilliant book was written on the Spirit of Law[1]. Savigny had laid down the dogma that the law of each nation is the natural and necessary outgrowth of the national consciousness. Ihering reminded his readers that Rome had thrice conquered the world, first by arms, secondly by religion, and lastly by law; and that the general reception of Roman law, of which Savigny was the historian, was inconsistent with the dogma of the exclusively national character of law, of which Savigny was the prophet. As nations live commercially by the free interchange of commodities, so they live intellectually by the free interchange of ideas, and they are not the worse, but the better, for borrowing from each other such laws and institutions as are suitable to their needs. It is true, as Savigny taught, and as Montesquieu had indicated before him, that the laws of a nation can only be understood if they are studied as part of the national life and character. But it is also true that the object of the jurist is to discover the general principles which underlie different systems of law. Only he has now realized that those principles cannot be discovered except by a profound and scientific study of the legal institutions and the legal history of different nations, and by comparing with each other the laws of different countries and the different stages of legal development. It was in order to discover the true meaning of the legal rules derived from ancient Rome, as the main
- ↑ The first edition of Ihering's Geist des römischen Rechts began to appear in 1852.
