DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMMON LAW the Northern coast of France in the ninth century. The Norman peasant is prover bial to-day in France for his litigiousness. In this Teutonic self-assertiveness, how ever, there is no disregard of duly consti tuted authority. The primitive Teuton had his Folk Mot in England, his Thing in Norway and Iceland. He was loyal to his chief or his king. He felt his duty to the community wherein he lived. He did not always obey the law, but he respected the law, and he felt the need of its enforce ment. Now, it belongs to a strong race to have the power of self-control. Our forefathers were fierce and passionate like other peoples, but they had this power of selfcontrol and they restrained themselves from overriding the law' and letting passion work injustice many a time when men of other races, Greeks, or Slavs or Celts would have yielded to their impulses. So too they had a latent solidity and steadiness which in disposed them to frequent or fitful change. Compared with their Slavonic neighbors to the east and their Celtic neighbors to the west, the Teutons, perhaps not more highly gifted, have always been of a conservative temper. This may be a mark of good sense and patience, or it may be an attribute of dogged and slowly moving minds. Anyhow, there it is, and for the purposes of law building, it is a merit of the first magnitude. Further, the mediaeval English mind was of a practical rather than of a specu lative type. It had plenty of acumen, plenty of logical vigor, but it did not run to the spinning of theories or the trying of experiments. This has been character istic, more or less, of the English and American mind; and I may add also of the Low German or Dutch mind, ever since the Middle Ages, as compared with the Scotch mind and with our brethren the High Germans of the European continent. For the purposes of law building this again is not a bad trait. Speaking to an American audience no one would venture to disparage
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ingenuity. The jurist needs it daily. But the jurist who is practicing law needs caution and practical judgment even more, and with all of your American ingenuity it has never been your way to run ahead of the needs of the time, or to pull up the plant and to look to see whether its roots are sprouting. Here then I have given you five charac teristics of the men to whom we owe the Common Law. They were strong men and pugnacious men; they respected authority; they could at need control their impulses; they were not given to change; they were not fertile in theory or invention. With these qualities they started on the work of making a law. Now, how did the conditions of England from the twelfth to the eighteenth century affect them, and so guide their action as to bring out the legal product which we have inher ited, a fruit very different from that which has ripened under the sun of Germany and France. The English king in the Middle Ages was strong, stronger than the kings of France or Castile or Aragon. He was, from the days of Henry II onwards, effective master — except for brief intervals — of his whole realm. He was able to make his executive authority feared, even if it was sometimes disobeyed. His writ ran everywhere; his judges traveling through the country brought the law to the sight of all men. His aim and that of his judges, was, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to build up one Law, instead of the variety of diverse legal customs such as had grown up in Continental Europe. Thus he and they — the judges — must needs strive to make the law clear and certain; and such it became. Here and there, as in Kent and in some old boroughs, local land customs survived, yet not enough to mar the unity and definiteness of the law as a whole. From good motives as well as bad, the king was tempted to stretch his authority and
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