pianist in the same way. It follows that the law can not be taught by merely giving to the student the form of words in which its rules are expressed for the direction of the courts, where such a form exits; still less in giving him the mere form of words in which the courts have enunciated their decisions of particular questions. In neither form is the science of law so expressed as to be readily assimilated by the mind of beginners. They require a knowledge of the topics with which the law deals, not merely in concrete form, but as reduced to a scientific classification affording terms of definite and consistent meaning, without which no general truth can be expressed. Indeed, there is no law for concrete cases, as there is no reasoning concerning singulars. All the certainty of the law consists in the general terms in which its truths are expressed.

No better illustration of this truth can be given than is afforded by the experience of the earliest modern law schools. Irnerius and his followers found themselves in possession of the grandest body of written laws ever yet in the possession of mankind, the body of civil law bequeathed by Rome to posterity. Naturally they assumed that the student needed only to know and remember the language of the civil law, with only such casual explanation as the novelty of some words might require. It soon became apparent, however, that these glosses were too numerous and too various to be carried in any mind by mere dint of memory and made of practical use when occasion called. The separate explanations soon grew into a science of interpretation, according to their effect upon the words of the text, by which the student or the practitioner could frame new interpretations as the case might require. All law being in their eyes the command of the emperor, this interpretation was the only mode in which its language could be adapted to the immense variety of actual questions arising in courts of justice, and therefore the science of interpretation was the science of law itself so far as the student or practitioner was concerned.

We may digress here for a moment to point out the important influence on English law of its lack of any written code like that of the Romans. With all the influence exerted by that code in England for a century and a half or two centuries after Vacarius, no part of it was ever accepted as an authoritative text in the island. Its authority was purely scientific and not legislative; and hence there could properly be no interpretation where there was no text to be interpreted.

Glanvil asserted the entire absence of written law when Vacarius was but lately dead if not still living; and Fleta followed him in the same assertion when the Roman law was in a rapid decline, more than a century later. To see how great a difference this makes and how largely it may account for that decline of Roman law which is a singular feature of our English experience, we need only to note the entire absence of the doctrine of interpretation from the early law of England, as we may easily do by comparing the text of Bracton with

that of the civilians from whom he borrows so much, and especially with Azo.

On the continent the acceptance of the entire text of the corpus juris civilis (with very trifling exceptions) as authoritive law, and the inposition thereon of a vast science of interpretation in the shape of glosses, comments, and finally of entire treatises, in time made the body of law so immense that the student could master it only imperfectly, 'and even the judge or practitioner was confused rather than enlightened by the amount of his reading. The practical consequence was that which must always result when a system of laws becomes too large or too verbosely expressed to be mastered as a harmonious whole, or applied as a consistent system in the decision of every case. Doubts and contradictions multiplied until there was hardly a practical question upon which the authorities did not conflict. The most honest judge was reduced to the poor expedient of counting the authorities for and against a proposed ruling, and following the majority instead of deducing a result from the fundamental principles of the law. Attempts to abridge or systematize the authorities only added to their bulk, so long as the false theory of accepting every word of the written text and every opinion of a commentator or interpreter as a part of the law continued. It was not until the great jurists of the sixteenth century saw the necessity of looking beneath this immense and shapeless mass of words for the few and comparatively simple principles in which the reason of the laws consisted that the way was open to improvement. The great historian of the Roman law in the middle ages has given us a most appreciative yet critical and just account of the condition of legal science from its revival to its lowest subsequent stage, three centuries later. (Savigny, History of the Roman Law in the Middle Ages; see especially Vol. III, chap. 28; Vol. V, chap. 41; and Vol. VI, chaps. 47 and 60.)

He has, indeed, fully appreciated the value of the glossators' services to the science while they were at work upon the text of the law and attempting to construct a systematic body of principles from it. He says justly that in this labor of construction a theory of law was evolved for the first time, at least since the classic age of Roman jurisprudence, and the beginning was made of that distinction between theory and practice which has been recognized ever since, a distinction, as he justly says, of benefit or of injury to the science as it is rightly or wrongly treated. (Vol. IV, p. 224.)

He then shows the change that came over their methods about the time when their labors were closed and their results were digested in the Accursion gloss; the elevation of that gloss to the rank of an authority even superior to the text, and the mere copying of former opinions in place of active thought in the elimination of principles. Writers were content to repeat the language of their predecessors and to follow the common opinion of the greater number without attempting to find the

reason of the law and the decision of the doubt in conformity with the principle. He also points out the instructive fact that this decline first appeared in the books written for practicing lawyers, which became mere compilations of points and dicta while a truer method of discussion still lingered in the schools. These books, by their verbosity, and by efforts to give an opinion upon every practical point, show that they were intended to content mere readers who sought to make a mechanical use of them without any expenditure of thought; a trait which has come down in lineal succession directly to the treatises and practical works of the present day.

Even the schools soon fell into a traditional method which no one dared to break over, and would have sunk into the merest formalism, destitute of all real life and activity, but for the presence in them of a few men who were not mere lecturers, but took an active part in contemporary life and business. These wrote Consilia, or opinions in actual cases, public and private, which are the characteristic books of the period, and by their constant reference to the actual relations and interests of men saved the schools from the deadening influence that then controlled them. This breath of real life could not by itself reform the absurd methods, then in use, but it imparted life enough to make them susceptible to the quickening efforts of the following century. Among the best of these writers are Cinus and Bartolus, who spent most of their early manhood in actual practice, and Bella Pertica and Lucas De Penna, who never sat in a teacher's chair. The latter's book is pronounced by Savigny freer from the defects of the school method than any other of his time. (Savigny, Vol. VI, pp. 1-21.)

But perhaps the most striking illustration of this aid to the schools from without (though not mentioned by Savigny because not coming within the limits of his subject) is the remarkable book of Conrad Lagus, a German writer, who in the sixteenth century wrote the first book for students that attempted to cut loose from the accepted methods, and to deliver the science of law to the student in the form in which it would find most ready entrance to his mind. Lagus himself was never a regular graduate or an accepted teacher of law. He filled in early life the place of private tutor to such students of the University of Louvain as chose to employ him, and was later syndic of the city of Dantzic on the Baltic. His book was first written for his own students, and was so free in its expression of criticisms upon prevailing methods that it gave great offense to the authorities, and was even put into the Index. But its merits enabled it to triumph over all opposition, and it went through several editions and no doubt had a most important influence in forming a new school of legal instruction. Even after three centuries and a half the student of scientific law may read it with interest and instruction. For the best account of Lagus see Dr. Theodore Muther's History of Legal Science and of the Universities in Germany, Jena, 1876, pp. 394-424.

In this sketch and in the picture given by Savigny of the lowest deg. radation of legal science, after its revival in the universities, the thoughtful reader must recognize too many traits of our own time. Thus, when he points out the neglect of the original authorities and the substitution of mere compilations at second or third hand, instead of a constant effort to trace back the law to its original principles; or when he speaks of the entire abandonment of efforts to treat the law as a system, as a consistent and harmonious whole; a task which by the natural law of its development should have given to that scientific unity a constantly increasing influence upon the separate rules and doctrines applicable to particular cases, instead of being neglected altogether in favor of exclusive attention to the authority quoted for each particular rule. There are even analogies in the external form of the law between the two periods. As in the fifteenth century, the earlier variety of juridicalworks had all given way to mere consilia or collections of opinions upon detached points, so in the nineteenth century we have a boundless waste of such opinions in our reports, increasing at the rate of a hundred volumes a year; with almost as many volumes of treatises, most of which are mere compilations of the same opinions, without the slightest attempt to evolve true principles or to present the law as a system. With reference to the entire lack of historical study at that time and the resemblance of our own country at present in that respect, the lesson furnished us by, the comparison is still more instructive. There was indeed for the fifteenth century the excuse that a historical science of law had never yet been dreamed of, while in the nineteenth we are willfully or ignorantly neglecting a method that has within the past century been thoroughly tested in Europe, and the benefits of which are evident to all who have paid it the slightest attention. Savigny's own words are here worth quoting:

All of a science that is the product of continuous development forms an organic whole; and no portion of it can be thoroughly understood unless it is studied in connection with the rest. Thus the entire system of legal science which governs our actions can only be thoroughly mastered by historical study, going back to its first beginning and following it into all later ramifications. Then we can use it freely for every new purpose as a means by which the freedom and effect of our own think ing will be increased and its object accomplished. Used in any other way, every mass of knowledge will only cramp and oppress our energies without our knowing it, and make us its servants where we should be its raasters. (Savigny, Vol. v, p. 474.)

The chief improvement of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly the abandonment of the legal method or study of the texts of law in their original order, and the substitution of systematic works in which the natural order of the subject was followed with more or less success. The work of Lagus, already mentioned, was perhaps the earliest example of this kind which now retains any value; for in the three centuries since there has been a constant improvement in the arrangement of these works, due to a more thorough comprehension of the law

itself and a greater mastery of the mode of teaching it. The most remarkable evidence of this mastery is in the great reduction of the size of the books placed in the student's hands. Instead of compelling him to read through and memorize ten or a dozen octavo volumes in the course of a year, the European professor places in his hands a modest duodecimo called institutes or pandects, containing all that is essential for him to read in a semester or even a year, while the subject condensed in that book will furnish the topic of daily exercises or lectures during that period. By this process the student's memory is charged only with those fundamental principles which he must always carry there in order to make any use of them; but his comprehension of them and power to apply to them is obtained by the fuller explanation given him and by his daily reflection upon them. This work, moreover, is not upon a single branch of law, however important, as all the work of an American law school is, but it is upon the law itself as a complete and harmonious system. Even in the fuller treatment of the Pandecten the space given to such topics as represent our "property," or "contract," or "wills," is hardly greater than it would be in the most elementary book known to American law; but the object of these few pages is to give the student a complete and thorough comprehension of the nature of the subject under which all his subsequent acquisitions will arrange themselves according to the very law of thought; not merely to give him a selection of the most practical rules by which he may know how to decide this or that particular question. Perhaps the greatest advantage in this mode of study is that the student acquires the law as a whole and not as a congeries of separate and independent doctrines; or, as it has been expressed by an eminent writer, quoted on page 37 of our report of 1891, "The continental lawyer in a comparatively brief university course of jurisprudence obtains a firm mastery of the entire law; the English lawyers are specialists. Not one is able to grasp the whole system."

We have dwelt on this point the more fully because it is needed to qualify what must be said of our present text-books as means of instruction. With few exceptions all these are written for the use of the prac ticing lawyer, whose object it is to find a case in point for the brief he is making, with the least possible expenditure of time, and without troubling himself with questions of classification or principle. The student, on the other hand, needs books rigidly systematized and dealing chiefly with general principles. It is only from these that he can assimilate matter which will become a true part of his mind and the basis of his legal thinking. For the decision of particular points or for the illus tration of general truths text-books are worse than useless. For these things he should be led directly to the cases themselves, but only under the most careful guidance.

The experienced lawyer can deal intelligently with a great body of varying if not conflicting cases, and deduce from them a harmonious