Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/370

 356 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S first two of the five epochs above described) by foreign law or foreign thought than Rome was, but the increase of England by the union, first of Scotland and then Ireland, and by the acquisition of transoceanic dominions, has not interrupted the purely insular or national development of English law. The conquest of Ireland, which began in the twelfth century but was not completed till the seventeenth, made no difference, because Ireland, always since the twelfth century far behind England in material progress and settled social order, re- ceived a separate civil administration with separate Courts. As these Courts administered English law, they followed in the path which England had already travelled and did not affect the progress of law in England. Nothing speaks more of the long-continued antagonism of the Teutonic and the Celtic elements in Ireland, and of the dominance of the Teu- tonic minority over the Celtic majority, than the practical identity of the common law in the two countries, and the total absence of any Celtic customs in that law. The few and comparatively slight differences which exist to-day between the law of England and that of Ireland are all due to statute. One is the absence of judicial divorce in Ireland, which an Act passed so recently as 1857 introduced in England. The second is to be found in the law relating to land, largely altered by statutes passed for Ireland by the British Parlia- ment of our own time. The third is the existence in Ireland of what are admitted to be exceptional and supposed to be temporary penal provisions, the last of which is the Preven- tion of Crime Act of 1887. As regards Scotland, when her king became king of England, and when, a century later, her Parliament was united with that of England, she retained her own law intact. In some 'few respects her law, founded on that of Rome, and her system of judicial administration are better than those of England, nor has she failed to con- tribute distinguished figures to the English bench and bar; but, as she stands far below England in population and wealth, she has affected the law of the larger country as little as the attraction of the moon affects the solid crust of the Earth. The vaster territorial expansion of the eighteenth and nine-