as they have been locally modified. A very large proportion of Colonial enactments are directly copied from the English Statute-book, with minor local variations. And the practice of looking for and copying precedents supplied by other legislatures is steadily on the increase, not only within the British Empire, but in all parts of the civilized world. This, then, is one cause of uniformity.
In the next place the facility of intercourse, and especially the closeness of commercial relations between different countries, tends to a general assimilation of commercial usages. The diversity of laws which was found intolerable in France at the end of the eighteenth century, and in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, has long made itself felt as a serious and as a remediable nuisance in matters of commerce throughout the world, and in many parts of the domain of commercial law we have either attained to or are within measurable distance of that common code of laws which is the dream of comparative jurists.
And lastly, in a world compacted and refashioned by science, those causes of difference to which Montesquieu attached importance, and in some cases exaggerated importance, causes such as climate, race, geographical conditions, difference in forms and degrees of civilization, tend to become of less importance. Not that they have disappeared, or can be left out of account. Montesquieu took much interest in questions of political economy, and he would certainly have pointed out that fiscal arrangements which are well adapted to a state whose territories are continuous, are presumably less well adapted to a state whose component parts are sundered by oceans. The question of race is always
