Introduction
important consequences either first or last in any legal system. The legislative era could not have come to pass so long as the Historical School remained in the ascendancy. If it is to be supposed that Savigny intended to assert an irremediable lack of competence in the people to attain the conscious stage of legislation, then that distinguished jurist was spared some part of the mental anguish of witnessing the historical refutation of such a position, had his life been prolonged another quarter of a century. He himself became Prussian minister for the revision of legislation, and lived to see the formulation of the General German Bills of Exchange Code (1847) and the General German Commercial Code (1861) in the time of the “Bund”; but a benignant fate closed his eyes before the date of the imperial statute (1873) which authorized a commission to codify the whole domain of private law, resulting finally (1896) in the enactment of the German Civil Code.
The second observation is that any assertion of a simple unifying principle in the
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