PRESENT AND FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 495 



isolated from the point of view of the legislations of the countries 

 in which they have their domicile or residence; public international 

 law, which regulates the relations between states, whether in times 

 of peace or during conflicts and wars, and the legal organization of 

 the society of nations. 



Private international law is, as we think, more than public inter- 

 national law, destined to be the law of the future. It would be the 

 law of the twentieth century, were it possible to suppress with one 

 stroke of the pen or one act of the will the sixty historical centuries, 

 the atavistic and hereditary influences of which place an almost 

 insuperable obstacle in the way of the early unification of private 

 law. This is apparent in a really striking way in the midst of the 

 vast American Republic. Although each of the states which form 

 the united republic is composed of elements almost identical, derived, 

 for the most part, from the distant lands of Europe, nevertheless, each 

 of these states preserves, with jealous care, the right to enact its 

 own law and to differentiate it from that of the neighboring states. 



Though it may be easy to understand and explain the diversity 

 of local and cantonal laws of countries like Germany or Switzerland 

 by the diversity of their races, or the influence of the feudal system, 

 it is more difficult to understand and to explain how such a differ- 

 entiation is produced among men who have been freed from the 

 nationalistic prejudices which have still so strong a hold in the old 

 world. In fact, it may be seen that one of the most serious difficul- 

 ties in the way of making private law international will arise from 

 the diversity of the legislations adopted by the states of the American 

 Union. 



This situation calls for most serious thought, for the old countries 

 of Europe have all successively followed the example given by 

 France when that country, carried away by the great humanitarian 

 wave of the Revolution of 1789, and led by the steel will of Napoleon, 

 decided to unify its local legislations and to endow the world with 

 a civil code. Since then the other countries of Europe, first Italy, 

 and last Germany, have unified their private law. Switzerland will 

 before long possess a single civil code, the draft of which has already 

 passed through the various stages preliminary to its final adoption. 



This very phenomenon of national unification of the private law 

 leads us to look for its international unification. It must not be 

 forgotten that it is the countries where conflicts between local laws 

 have been most strenuous in the course of the last centuries, where 

 the statutory literature has been richest and most ingenious, namely 

 Italy, France, and Belgium, which were the first to feel the incon- 

 venience of multiplied legislations, and put an end to the regrettable 

 controversies of former days amounting to veritable dialectical 

 games and inconsiderate waste of intellectual forces. It would be 



