if it is possible, the cruel wrongs you have suffered, and rejoice at least in the thought that the epoch in which your innocence is recognized is that of a new order of things, which will in future prevent such sad mistakes."
This celebrity did not. profit the family of Verdure. Two of the children died miser ably; Verdure himself died shortly after, while he was filling the humble position of concierge in a factory in the Faubourg Poissonniere.
GERMAN CUSTOMS — A SOURCE OF COMMON LAW. through Gaul and Britain, and therefore THE English law, like the English lan guage, is mixed and compounded of records what he himself had either seen or many elements. To understand it in a heard among the natives. But Tacitus wrote thorough and scholarlike manner, we must at home. The precision and accuracy with trace the sources from which it springs. which he has pencilled the manners of the These sources are many, and drawn, too, Germans may well excite wonder; for Ger from a sufficient distance. Although we are many was at that time a distant, unknown, indebted to the civil law for many principles and barbarous province, and he himself had never wandered among its wild forests and of our own (especially in equity and com mercial jurisprudence), yet it is from our still wilder warriors. His little treatise, how sturdy and roving ancestors of the north, ever, sheds a flood of light upon the early that we have derived the broad and bold antiquities of the law. Of all the features of the common law, the outlines of that happy system under which we live, and whose very end and aim is boldest and broadest are its love of liberty, its devotion to good morals, and its abhor liberty. i Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless rence of fraud. In this system fraud vitiates true, that those hordes of Goths and Vandals everything which it touches, and no obligation that swarmed from the northern hive, and is enforced which is founded on a breach of whose name has become a reproach and a sound public morals. It declares that the by-word for all that is barbarous, are the consent of the governed is the only true very people that spread law, language, and source of all law. Here it stands in bright liberty over our western world. If, there contrast with the law of imperial Rome, and fore, it is to be regretted that they overturned clearly shows its origin and descent. Of all an empire which would soon have fallen of uncivilized nations of which we have any itself, and destroyed monuments of art which record, the Germans were the freest, most time in its course must necessarily have moral, and most trustworthy. In such sacred swept away, should we not rejoice that they regard did they hold their word, that after brought with them customs as free as they they had lost their property at play, they would wager their persons and their liberty. themselves were wild, and planted institu tions which have grown in wisdom, as they If the die was cast against them, they suf fered themselves to be bound and sold as ripened with time? Fortunate indeed is it for the lawyer no slaves; and what to others would seem obsti less than the scholar, that those customs nacy, they dignified with the name of faith. have been sketched by the graceful pen of Nothing could surpass the esteem in which Caesar and painted by the masterly hand of they held the fairer sex. None but noble Tacitus. Caesar, indeed, fought and travelled men had more than a single wife. Adultery
