number of valuable expositions, is, in respect to our question, far in advance of that of the whole continent. In Germany, Heinze brought the problem in its wider aspects under discussion about ten years ago, and the German Juristentag began a searching investigation of it. But so remote was the subject then for the otherwise far-sighted legal world of Germany, that the Juristentag had to speak three times upon it, at Hanover, Nuremberg, and Salzburg, before it could arrive at a communis opinio. This ten years' work would have gone without result, had not a number of striking cases of unjust condemnation recently grieved the public sense of right, led to the introduction of motions in the German Reichstag and the Austrian Reichsrath, and called out a considerable literature of pamphlets and essays by Geyer, Jaques, Schwarze, Lilienthal, List, Kronecker, Gernerth, Bar, Bähr, Jacobi, and the anonymous author of the admirable little treatise, "Gerichtsaal." If, on the other hand, we review the German literature—including discussions of principles and text-books—on criminal process up to the papers that were prepared for the Juristentag of 1874, we shall find it wholly silent with respect to our question. This silence is easily understood, in view of what we have said. For the monographic division and subdivision to which legal science, after premature and futile efforts to give it philosophical comprehension, was subjected, with the object of sounding it in detail and mastering the concrete material, involved the laying aside of those problems which had to be solved rather by a simultaneous and uniform review than by any special legal study. To this class of problems belongs our question, which appears to partake at once of the nature of public and private right; to it, to cite a pair of related examples, belong the testing of the constitutionality of laws by the courts, which enters at the same time into the administrative and the judicial domain; and the question of the distinctions between civil and criminal injuries, the scientific solution of which is deduced from both private and criminal law. To it belongs also the question of the responsibility of the state for the faults of its officers, the solution of which again presumes a weighing of factors of private and public law, and this solution science has not until very recently troubled itself to advance.
These changes of aspect and alternatives, by reason of which the cause of reproach exists, that, except in Switzerland, the right of innocent convicts to indemnification has not till the present time received legislative recognition in any European state, have their deeper causes in closest connection with the course of civilizational and political development. So long as the right of the whole public was embodied in the absolute lord's will—so long as the principle prevailed of that lex regia transmitted from the Roman law which said, "Princeps legihus solutus est"—so long could there not be the remotest suggestion of the right to an indemnity based upon the fact of an unjust condemnation, or of an appeal by the individual against the state. How could a claim
