The Struggle for Law
find fault with me when I allege that the Historical School in law might just as well have been called the romantic. That law and the principles of legal right come into existence or are formed painlessly, without trouble, without action, like the vegetable creation, is a really romantic notion, that is, a notion based on a false idealization of past conditions. Stern reality teaches us the contrary, and not alone that small part of that reality which we have before our eyes ourselves, and which presents us, almost everywhere, with the most strenuous endeavors of nations in respect to the formation of their legal relations—questions of the gravest nature which crowd one upon another; but the impression remains the same, no matter what part of the past we contemplate. Savigny's theory can, therefore, appeal to nothing but prehistoric times of which we have no information. But if we may be permitted to indulge in hypothesis in relation to them, I am willing to oppose to Savigny's, which represents them as the time of the
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