Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/574

 560 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY est king more than six hundred years before, — a common law. Each province throughout southern and western Eu- rope had its custom, each land-owner his own jurisdiction. The rigor of the criminal law had been somewhat modified in France by the legislation of the revolution, and just at the beginning of our century the Civil Code, first of the French Codes, was adopted. These codes, temporarily or permanently impressed on a large part of Europe outside of France, constituted the beginning of modern legislative reform. The spirit of the time molds and shapes its law, as it molds and shapes its manner of thought and the whole current of its life. For law is the eflfort of a people to express its idea of right; and while right itself cannot change, man's conception of right changes from age to age, as his knowledge grows. The spirit of the age, therefore, affecting as it must man's conception of right, affects the growth both of the common and of the statute law. But the progress toward ideal right is not along a straight line. The storms of ignorance and passion blow strong, and the ship of progress must beat against the wind. Each successive tack brings us nearer the ideal, yet each seems a more or less abrupt departure from the preceding course. The radicals of one period become the conservatives of the next, and are sure that the change is a retrogression ; but the experience of the past assures us that it is progress. Two such changes have come in the last century. The eighteenth had been, on the whole, a self-sufficient century; the leaders of thought were usually content with the world as it was, and their ideal was a classical one. The prophets of individuality were few and little heeded. But at the end of the century, following the American and French revolu- tions, an abrupt change came over the prevailing current of thought throughout the civilized world ; and, at the begin- ning of the period under discussion, the rights of man and of nations become subjects not merely of theoretical discus- sion but of political action. The age became one of daring speculation. Precedent received scant consideration. The American revolution had established the right of the common