6. M AIT LAND: THE RENAISSANCE 205 A hundred legislatures — little more or less — are now building on that foundation: on the rock that was not sub- merged. We will not say this boastfully. Far from it. Standing at the beginning of a century and in the first year of Edward VII, thinking of the wide lands which call him king, thinking of our complex and loosely-knit British Com- monwealth, we cannot look into the future without serious misgivings. If unity of law such unity as there has been — disappears, much else that we treasure will disappear also, and (to speak frankly) unity of law is precarious. The power of the parliament of the United Kingdom to legislate for the colonies is fast receding into the ghostly company of legal fictions. Men of our race have been litigious ; the great Ihering admired our litigiousness ; '^^ it is one of our more amiable traits ; but it seems to me idle to believe that distant parts of the earth will supply a tribunal at West- minster with enough work to secure uniformity. The so- called common law of one colony will swerve from that of another, and both from that of England. Some colonies will have codes.^^ If English lawyers do not read Australian reports (and they cannot read everything), Australian law- yers will not much longer read English reports. Still the case is not yet desperate. Heroic things can be done by a nation which means to do them: as witness the J. F. Dillon, Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America, 1894, p. 155: "the common law [in distinction from the Roman or civil law] is the basis of the laws of every State and Territory of the Union, with comparatively unimportant and gradually waning exceptions." "Ihering, Der Kamff urn's Recht, ed. 10, pp. 45, 69: " Ich habe bereits oben das Beispiel des kampflustigen Englanders angefUhrt, und ich kann bier nur wiederholen, was ich dort gesagt: in dem Gulden, um den er bartniickig streitet, steckt die politische Entwicklung Eng- lands. Einem Volke, bei dem es allgemeine Uebung ist, dass Jeder auch im Kleinen und Kleinsten sein Recht tapfer behauptet, wird Niemand wagen, das Hochste, was es hat, zu entreissen, und es ist daher kein Zufall, dass dasselbe Volk des Alterthums, welches im In- nern die hochste politische Entwicklung und nach Aussen bin die grosste Kraftentfaltung aufzuweisen hat, das romische, zugleich das ausgebildetste Privatrecht besass." " Thus in particular Queensland in 1899 enacted a criminal code of 707 sections. See Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, New Ser., vol. vi., pp. 555-560: "The precedents utilised in framing the Code were the [in England abortive] draft English codes of 1879 and 1880, the Italian Penal Code of 1888, and the Penal Code of the State of New York." See also Ilbert, Legislative Methods, p. 155.
