10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 361 sent by the sovereign, enactments which however were not universally obeyed, dealt very little with law proper, even in the days of its greatest strength. Still less were the French States-General, even before their long eclipse, an effective legislature. Thus the development of the law of both Ger- many and France fell mainly into the hands of the jurists, qualified to some extent in Germany by the ordinances enacted by the electors, landgraves, and other princes, as well as by the free imperial cities, and (in later days) by the kings whose dominions formed part of the decaying Empire, and qualified in post-mediaeval France by the ordinances of the king. In both countries it was upon the Roman law, as modified by custom, that the jurists worked, and hence in neither did a body of law grow up which was truly national, in the sense either of having a distinctive national quality or of embracing the whole nation or of having been enacted by a national legislature. The first complete unity given to law in France was given by Napoleon. His Code was based on the Roman law theretofore used, which had to a considerable extent been already codified under Lewis XIV; yet the crea- tion of one Code for the whole country was a step so bold that it could hardly have been attempted except by an autocrat and on the morrow of a revolution. The first modern effort to give unity to law in Germany, itself an efflux of the aspira- tion for national unity, was made by the General Bills of Exchange Law (Wechselordnung) (1848-1850), while a general Commercial Code (Gemeines Handelsgesetzhucli) enacted in various States between 1862 and 1866 was re- enacted for the new Empire in 1871. The fuller unity long desired was attained in 1900, when the new general Code for the whole German Empire came into force. This similarity between the legal history of France and that of Germany seems the more curious when one remembers that, so far as mere political unity is concerned, France attained that unity comparatively early, one may say at the end of the fifteenth century, while Qermany continued down till the extinction of the old Empire in 1806 to go on losing what political unity she had possessed. It was not till 1866 that she began to
