Page:Struggle for Law (1915).djvu/37

 required for such an enterprise; and he endeavored to prove his assertion by isolated passages drawn from Prussian, Austrian and French legislation of that period.

“The irony of fate decreed that the coronation of his pupil and protector, William IV, should afford him the opportunity to exchange the professor’s chair for the chief position in the Department of Justice, especially created for him. Savigny, the theorizer and opponent of legislation, had the weakness to accept the post, and he found the means to demonstrate fully what he called: ‘the want of calling of our own time for legislation,’ when the regulations relating to letters of exchange, and the German commercial code which appeared almost in the same epoch, strikingly disproved his assertion.

“The theory which he advanced on this occasion on customary law and legislation was not entirely new, but it is Savigny’s merit to have presented it in its scientific light, and thus to have given it a claim to be called science. According to this theory, the earliest