only is the criminal law wholly English, but the
fundamental common-law institutions, supremacy of
law, case law and hearing of causes as a whole in
open court, have imposed themselves on a French
code and have made great portions of the law Anglo-
American in all but name. There are many signs
that the common law is imposing itself gradually in
like manner upon the French law in Quebec. In
everything but terminology it has all but overcome
a received Roman law in Scotland. The established
Roman-Dutch law in South Africa is slowly giving
way before it as the judges more and more reason in
a Romanized terminology after the manner of com-
mon-law lawyers. In the Philippines and in Porto
Rico there are many signs that common-law adminis-
tration of a Roman code will result in a system
Anglo-American in substance if Roman-Spanish in
its terms.

Whether it is the innate excellence of our legal
system or the innate cocksureness of the people that
live under it, so that even as Mr. Podsnap talked to
the Frenchman as if he were a deaf child, we assume
that our common-law notions are part of the legal
order of nature and are unable to understand that
any reasonable being can harbor legal conceptions
that run counter to them, the Anglo-Saxon refuses
to be ruled by any other law. Even more, he suc-
ceeds in ruling others thereby. For the strength of
the common law is in its treatment of concrete con-
troversies, as the strength of its rival, the modern
Roman law, is in its logical development of abstract
conceptions. Hence wherever the administration of

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