Page:Montesquieu.djvu/22

22 judges and magistrates for France. Not that he wrote as a lawyer. For some fourteen years he was a member of the judicial bench known as the Parlement of Guienne, and in that capacity administered Roman law, such of the Royal Ordinances as extended to his province, and no less than ten different local customs. But he did not take much interest in the technical side of his professional work, and it may be doubted whether his judgements, if reported, would have carried more weight with his professional brethren than those of his distinguished predecessor on the same bench—Montaigne. Nor did he take any active part in the scientific work in which the great French lawyers of the eighteenth century were engaged. That work was digesting, expressing, and systematically arranging the principles of the customary law and the modernized Roman law, and thus collecting the materials and preparing the framework for the codes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The leaders in this work were the great Chancellor d'Aguesseau and Pothier. But Montesquieu does not, so far as I am aware, make any reference to Pothier or his school at Orleans, and his relations to d'Aguesseau were scanty and formal. Indeed, between the lively President and the grave Chancellor there was little in common. If Montesquieu had lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he would not, we may feel sure, have got on with Lord Cairns. It was Voltaire, and not Montesquieu, that preached the duty of unifying French law, and Montesquieu's personal preference would probably have been for diversity rather than for uniformity. But Montesquieu