DEVELOPMENT DURING PAST CENTURY 477 



no codifier will be satisfied to accept the judgment of a court or any 

 body of other men upon the meaning of his code, nor to accept the 

 interpretation of the executive department on the proper execution 

 of the law. It will follow that each codifier of the Benthamite type 

 must be legislature, judge and sheriff, and the logical result (like 

 the logical result of all individualism carried to an extreme) is an- 

 archy. 



This failure of the hope of the individualistic codifiers and the 

 change in the spirit of the age have affected our ideal of codification. 

 The purpose of the modern codifiers is not to state the law com- 

 pletely, but to unify the law of a country which at present has many 

 systems of law, or to state the law in a more artistic way. In other 

 words, the spirit of the modern codifiers is not individualistic, but 

 centralizing. Thus the modern European codes of Italy, Spain, 

 and Germany were adopted in countries where a number of different 

 systems of law prevailed, and the purpose of codification in each 

 state was principally to adopt one system of law for the whole 

 country and incidentally to make the expression of the law conform 

 to the results of legal scholarship. The same purpose is at the basis 

 of the American Commission for the Uniformity of Legislation. 

 The purpose of the English codifiers appears to be merely an artistic 

 one. It cannot be better expressed than by the last great disciple 

 of Bentham, Professor Holland. The law expressed in a code, he 

 says, has " no greater pretensions to finality than when expressed 

 in statutes and reported cases. Clearness, not finality, is the object 

 of a code. It does not attempt impossibilities, for it is satisfied with 

 presenting the law at the precise stage of elaboration at which it 

 finds it; neither is it obstructively rigid, for deductions from the 

 general to the particular and the competition of opposite analogies 

 are as available for the decision of new cases under a code as under 

 any other form in which the law may be embodied." " It defines 

 the terminus a quo, the general principle from which all legal argu- 

 ments must start." 



" The task to which Bentham devoted the best powers of his 

 intellect has still to be commenced. The form in which our law is 

 expressed remains just what it was." 



Such a code as he describes is really very far from the ideal of 

 Bentham. It does not do away with judge-made law; it does not 

 enable the individual to know the law for himself; its only claim 

 is that it facilitates the acquisition of knowledge by the lawyer by 

 placing his material for study in a more orderly and logical form. 

 The cherished ideals of the reformers of a hundred years ago have 

 been abandoned, and an ideal has been substituted which is quite 

 in accordance with the spirit of our own times. 



