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The Green Bag

ticularly on the basis of the Pandects. The Prussian Landrecht, the Saxon and Austrian civil codes, contain a large

number of legal rules which are directly borrowed from the law of the Pandects." While the Landesrecht, or “Provincial Law," is expressly annulled, an incon

a call for a convention of states to meet at Annapolis, in order to consider the establishment of a uniform commercial

system. When Maryland prompted Vir ginia to take that step, by proposing

main in force, which are, strictly speak ing, “agrarian," because designed for the farmer, for agricultural conditions

that commissioners from all the states should be invited to meet and regulate the restrictions on commerce for the whole, Madison saw at once the advan tage of “a Politico-commercial commis sion” for the continent. The outcome

generally, as well as for the protection

of the meeting at Annapolis was the call

siderable number of its enactments re

of vested rights.

As the farmer and the

for a convention“to meet at Philadelphia

merchant are and have been the two

on the second Monday of the next May

great powers in German history, the

to consider the situation of the United

industrial and agrarian laws that survive may well be compared to the jus civile,

States." All the world now knows that three years and a half prior to the meet ing of the Annapolis convention a pros perous merchant of Philadelphia, Pela tiah Webster, who began as early as

while the laws of the Civil Code may be said to resemble the Roman jus gentium.

The merchant has not inaptly been called “the father of the Civil Code of Germany" because, as commercial inter

1776 to write on the currency, and in 1779 commenced the publication of a

course recognizes no national boundaries,

series of “Essays on Free Trade and

he was naturally the ﬁrst to desire a

Finance"—put forth, on February 16, 1783, as his invention, the entirely new scheme of federal government embodied in the existing Constitution of the United

homogeneous system of civil rights. It was the mercantile element in the Ger man cities that eventually crushed the

spirit of feudalism; it was the mercantile element that opened the way for an Imperial Code by ﬁrst creating a uni form system of commercial law. The ﬁrst modern effort to give unity to law in Germany was made, as a prelude to the movement for natural unity, by the

States. The elaborate and ﬁnished essay in which that epoch-making discovery was announced is just as authentic as

the Constitution itself. Just as it may be said that the merchant was “the father of the Civil Code of Germany,” so it

German Bills of Exchange Law (Wech

may be said that a merchant was "the father of the Constitution of the United

selordnung, 1848-1850), while a general Commercial Code (Gemeines Handel: gesetzbuch), enacted in various states be tween 1862 and 1866, was re-enacted for the new Empire in 1871.

tect large space is given to the influence of the merchant. “Merchants," he said, “must from the nature of their business certainly understand the interests and

In juxtaposition with the foregoing statement as to the inﬂuence of com

merce upon the unity of law in Germany should be set the fact that the ﬁrst step towards the making of the existing Con

stitution of the United States was taken in January, 1786, when Virginia issued

States.”

In the plan of the great archi

resources of their country the best of any men in it. . . . Itherefore humbly propose, if the merchants in the several states are disposed to send delegates from their body, to meet and attend the sitting of Congress, that they shall be permitted to form a chamber of com