THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBER, 1880. 



THE SCIENCE OF COMPAKATIVE JURISPRUDENCE. 



Br WILLIAM M. IVINS. 



AN unbeliever in the possibilities of an exact historical science. 

 Mr. Goldwin Smith, has said that history is like a child's box 

 of letters, out of which we may spell whatsoever we please. As illus- 

 trative of his meaning, he might have taken the works of any of the 

 old jurists, say Domat or Blackstone, for instance, and shown that 

 that which they called history was too apt to be nothing more than a 

 succession of ingenious but not always happy guesses. Writing upon 

 the history of law, they used only such facts as squared with their pre- 

 conceived philosophy of law which philosophy, in its turn, was only 

 another and slightly modified form of their dogmatic theology, from 

 which it was a series of deductions. We owe the old legists, from the 

 time of Gaius to that of Blackstone, a vast debt which we can never 

 pay ; but it is for the body of substantive law they have left us, not for 

 their bizarre and unscientific speculations as to the origin and philoso- 

 phy of law. 



In his chapter on Rousseau's " Theory of the Social Compact," 

 Mr. John Morley says : " Signal novelties in thought are as limited as 

 signal inventions in architectural construction. It is only one of the 

 great changes in method that can remove the limits of the old com- 

 binations, by bringing new material and fundamentally altering the 

 point of view." The truth of this remark is nowhere better shown 

 than in the very matter of which we have been speaking. If we may 

 claim to know more than our forefathers about the actual historical 

 development of law, it is only because we have become possessed of a 

 new historical method which has already wrought signal, if not funda- 

 mental, alterations in our point of view so far as regards the origin 



VOL. XVII. 37 



