270 HISTORY OF LAW 



sition of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, to determine that 

 the common law system should substantially prevail in that great 

 region. Those ambitious and adventurous pioneers of Latin civil- 

 ization, La Salle, Marquette, and Joliet, blazed the way for the civil 

 law, but the legitimate fruits of their struggle were not gathered by 

 the civil law, but on the other hand were substantially denied to it 

 when Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. 

 If the common law system is better suited to the needs of a free 

 people and an advancing civilization than the civil law, which ob- 

 tained its historical form under an absolute empire, then it is fortunate 

 for humanity, and in particular for the people of this great Western 

 country, that in the conflict of races supremacy was established for 

 the common law by the success of those who inherited Anglo-Saxon 

 institutions and established them throughout the region between 

 the Mississippi and the Pacific. 



