parties ought to be governed by the law of the Colony or the law of England; but no considerable work on the subject appeared before the elaborate and voluminous commentaries of Mr. Burge, a work to which succeeding authors upon Private International Law have been much indebted.

The lawyers of the United States of North America were necessarily led, from the same cause as the lawyers of the old Netherlands and of France before the Revolution-namely, the existence of various States with various laws in one Commonwealth-to the study of this jurisprudence.

The learned essay of Livermore led to the elaborate and popular work of Story, which has exercised great influence and obtained a very high authority in this kingdom, as well as in the country of its author.

I must, however, be allowed to remark that even Story wrote, the nature of his work being considered, too much in the spirit of an English Common Lawyer, and too little in the spirit of an International Jurist.

With the work of Felix Story does not appear to have any intimate knowledge; he makes no reference to Rocco; and with the essays of Wächter and the last of the eight volumes of Savigny he was necessarily unacquainted.

While preparing this volume for the press, I was glad to find that this Treatise of Savigny had attracted the attention of Mr. Westlake, whose recent work on Private International Law has taken its place in the legal literature of England. .

Since the Commentaries of Donellus, to whom Savigny was deeply indebted, no more philosophical or profound work has appeared than the great work of Savigny on the system of Roman Jurisprudence, in its application to the particular law of his own country, Prussia, and to the general law of the European Continent. His eighth volume contains a separate treatise on Private International Law, conceived in the same spirit and executed with the same ability as the great work of which it is a part. It has been constantly referred to in this work.

I cannot help expressing a hope that the Treatises of such jurists as those of Puchta and Savigny, which have the merits without the defects of German erudition, may one day become familiar to English lawyers.

IV. Something let me say, in conclusion, as to the frequent and full reference made throughout this work to the Jurisprudence of ancient Rome, till lately so little known and so often misunderstood in England.

The advantage to the Jurisprudence of Comity which results from this study is twofold: First, a knowledge of the laws, not only of a most civilised people, but of a people which continually imported and incorporated into their administration of justice to foreigners the rules and principles of foreign law, which the reason of the thing and the nature of the relation rendered applicable, when they manifestly rendered inapplicable the strict civil law of the Roman citizen.

In the Institutes, the Digest, and the Code, we are therefore enabled to study a system of Jurisprudence which avowedly passed over the limits of the positive law of the State in which it sprung up; a Jurisprudence intended to be applicable to the world.

Secondly, we study in it a system of Jurisprudence. Nothing can more advance the culture of Private International Law than the study, not of the letter, but of the spirit, of Roman Jurisprudence, which, because it recognised the duty of applying to jura acquired without its limits, or by others than its own citizens, a law founded upon general principles, has become the basis of the law of Christendom.

The law of England and the United States of North America is not properly called by Story the Common Law in a Treatise on Private International Law.

If there be any Common Law of States upon this subject, it is, for the reasons already given, furnished by the Roman Law.

Huber justly remarks that, though you may look in vain for rules eo nomine on the Conflict of Laws in the repositories of Roman Jurisprudence, yet you will find rules applicable to the subject: Regulæ "tamen fundamentales, secundum quas hujus rei (i.e. "conflictus legum) judicium regi debet, ex ipso jure "Romano videntur esse petenda" (g).

The sculptor and the painter who are worthy of

(g) Prælect. II.

the name study the works of the ancient masters, not as the object of literal and servile copy, but of reverential and careful inquiry into the principles of truth by which these works have been immortalised.

In like manner, the Jurist ought to study the Roman Law, searching into those principles of truth which, under the guidance of an intimate and practical acquaintance with the nature of legal relations, have rendered it an everlasting monument of the people whose genius brought it forth.