hes were being made to
complete administrative unity, and while a fervid national spirit had
been developed among the people. The contrast was one which fructified
in many serious results, and among them we must rank the effect which
it produced on the minds of the French lawyers. Their speculative
opinions and their intellectual bias were in the strongest opposition
to their interests and professional habits. With the keenest sense and
the fullest recognition of those perfections of jurisprudence which
consist in simplicity and uniformity, they believed, or seemed to
believe, that the vices which actually infested French law were
ineradicable; and in practice they often resisted the reformation of
abuses with an obstinacy which was not shown by many among their less
enlightened countrymen. But there was a way to reconcile these
contradictions. They became passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law.
The Law of Nature overleapt all provincial and municipal boundaries;
it disregarded all distinctions between noble and burgess, between
burgess and peasant; it gave the most exalted place to lucidity,
simplicity and system; but it committed its devotees to no specific
improvement, and did not directly threaten any venerable or lucrative
technicality. Natural law may be said to have become the common law of
France, or, at all events, the admission of its dignity and claims was
the one tenet which all French practitioners alike subscribed to. The
language of the prae-revolutionary jurists in its eulogy is singularly
unqualified, and it is remarkable that the writers on the Customs, who
often made it their duty to speak disparagingly of the pure Roman law,
speak even more fervidly of Nature and her rules than the civilians
who professed an exclusive respect for the Digest and the Code.
Dumoulin, the highest of all authorities on old French Customary Law,
has some extravagant passages on the Law of Nature; and his panegyrics
have a peculiar rhetorical turn which indicated a considerable
departure from the caution of the Roman jurisconsults. The hypothesis
of a Natural Law had become not so much a theory guiding practice as
an article of speculative faith, and accordingly we shall find that,
in the transformation which it more recently underwent, its weakest
parts rose to the level of its strongest in the esteem of its
supporters.

The eighteenth century was half over when the most critical period in
the history of Natural Law was r