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142 Natural Jurisprudence considered as models of universal legislation, that their authors reason concerning laws too abstractedly, without specifying the particular circumstances of the society to which they mean that their conclusions should be applied. It is very justly observed by Mr Bentham, that, “if there are any books of universal Jurisprudence, they must be looked for within very narrow limits.” He certainly, however, carries this idea too far, when he asserts, that “to be susceptible of an universal application, all that a book of the expository kind can have to treat of, is the import of words; and that, to be strictly speaking universal, it must confine itself to terminology; that is, to an explanation of such words connected with law, as power, right, obligation, liberty, to which are words pretty exactly correspondent in all languages.” His expressions, too, are somewhat unguarded, when he calls the Law of Nature “an obscure phantom, which, in the imaginations of those who go in chace of it, points sometimes to manners, sometimes to laws, sometimes to what law is, sometimes to what it ought to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more exact and judicious than this description, when restricted to the Law of Nature, as commonly treated of by writers on Jurisprudence; but if extended to the Law of Nature, as originally understood among ethical writers, it is impossible to assent to it, without abandoning all the principles on which the science of morals ultimately rests. With these obvious, but, in my opinion, very essential limitations, I perfectly agree with Mr Bentham, in considering an abstract code of laws as a thing equally unphilosophical in the design, and useless in the execution.

In stating these observations, I would not be understood to dispute the utility of turning the attention of students to a comparative view of the municipal institutions of different nations; but only to express my doubts whether this can be done with advantage, by referring these institutions to that abstract theory called the Law of Nature, as to a common standard. The code of some particular country must be fixed on as a ground-work for our speculations; and its laws studied, not as consequences of any abstract principles of justice, but in their connection with the circumstances of the people among whom they originated. A comparison of these laws with the corresponding laws of other nations, considered also in their connection with the circumstances whence they arose, would form a branch of study equally interesting and useful; not merely to those who have in view the profession of law, but to all who receive the advantages of a liberal education. In fixing on such a standard, the preference must undoubtedly be given to the Roman law, if for no other reason than this, that its technical language is more or less incorporated with all our municipal regulations in this part of the world: and the study of this language, as well as of the other technical parts of