Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/529

 15. DILLON: INFLUENCE OF BENT HAM 515 exist or the foreign are manifestly superior, — and out of all these build an edifice of law, primarily designed and adapted to daily use, which shall be at once symmetrical, harmonious, simple, and commodious. There is here room and need for all. The institutional writer, the law teacher, the philosophic student, the scientific jurist, the experienced lawyer, the learned judge, the practical legislator, has each his place. They are not repellent and antagonistic agencies, but allies and co-laborers in the noblest work that can engage the attention, and draw forth and exemplify the highest powers of the human intellect. Toward the realiza- tion of this ideal let us press on with generous ardor, guided not by the motto of Ihering, prescribed for Continental action, — " Through the Roman law, but beyond it," — but rather by this other motto : " Through our own law, "and beyond it wherever it is plainly defective or incom- " plete."