360 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S ternational or ordinary private law, seem now to claim even fewer votaries in England than they do in France or Grer- many, and certainly fewer than they do in the United States. VI. Observations on France and Germany The sketch which I have sought to draw of the rela- tions of general history to legal history might have been with advantage extended to include the legal history of other States, and particularly of two such important factors in modern civilization as France and Germany, But, apart from the undue length to which an essay would stretch if it tried to cover so large a field, there is a good reason why we may deem these two countries less well suited for the sort of comparative treatment here assayed. Neither of them has had the kind of independent and truly national legal development which belonged to Rome and belongs to Eng- land. Each of them started on its career with a body of pre-existing law, made elsewhere, viz. the Roman law which had come down to France and to Germany from antiquity. In Gaul, even in the parts most settled by the Franks, the law of the Empire held its ground, though everywhere largely modified by feudal land usages, and in the northern half of the country, when it had ceased to be Gaul and had become France, in the form of customs and not of written Roman texts. In Germany the old Teutonic customary law was by degrees (except as regards land rights) supplanted by the Corpus luris of Justinian, in conformity with the idea, fantastic as that idea now appears to us, which regarded the Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar down to Constantine the Sixth as the predecessors in title of the Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Thus neither the French nor the Germans built up on their own national foundation a law distinctively their own. Moreover, both Germany and France stand contrasted with England as well as with Rome in the fact that neither country ever had a true central legislature or central system of law courts comparable with the Parlia- ment and King's Courts of England. The German Diet, though enactments were occasionally made in it with its con-
