perfection; who not only reverently preserve the remains of the past, but hand down to their posterity a still more glorious heritage. In its lowest form it is a transmission. of mere physical existence, with a gradually accumulating store of instincts and habits. The transmission of accumulated material wealth indicates a higher stage. In its highest development the succession becomes spiritual, until it appears to transcend material things. The most precious bequest to posterity is a higher civilisation than the predecessor received. Law, however, deals with this movement only between individuals, and small groups of individuals, and in general only with reference to property and material rights. Mankind, in development and as coexisting, is a unity. International law strives completely to formulate the unity of mankind in space; the law of succession strives partially to do the same in time.

LECTURE XI.

PERSON.

WHAT is the idea of right? In the five preceding lectures I have been examining the answer, that rights and obligations spring from the relations of men. We have seen men are related as individuals, then in families, clans, tribes, and states; and finally, as an organic whole, in the conception of humanity, in which each individual is both ruler and ruled-both master and servant. We have seen each of those groups in succession asserting and enforcing the rights of the individual, either against other groups or in relation to his own group. We might thus construct a complete code of positive law by showing what rights the state or humanity-I might almost say the jus gentium-will recognise. But there is a converse side. We may regard the individual as expanding and bursting the fetters of the lower groups-freeing himself from the family and appealing to the state, rebelling against the state and appealing to humanity. And in this way we might make a code of the rights claimed by the individual which would correspond exactly, like the counterpart of a seal, to the former code constructed from the side of the universal. The question is not finally answered by

saying rights spring from relations, because a further question suggests itself. Is there not something in the nature of the individual which generates law? Yes; the individuals must be self-conscious persons, and this element is as essential as the relation. The persons are nothing apart from the relation, but the relation is nothing unless those related are persons.

We may regard the group as the form, and the individuals as the matter. The group is merely the shell with which the living organism within has clothed itself. The human spirit has recorded its progress in material things -buildings, literature, works of art; and similarly in the history of the material rights of person and property, and in the history of the family and the state, we may read the history of the human spirit. The history of law is thus a struggle between form and matter. The person in his striving after freedom would destroy the family, allow free divorce, obliterate states, abolish property. On the other hand, the abstract forms of the state, the family and property, tend to crush the individual out of existence. It is only a living organism which can practically reconcile this contradiction. The view which has sometimes prevailed is, that man is an existence with certain rights tacked on, or attributed to him. Personality in such a view may be merely implicitly recognised, but it is apt to be regarded as merely the unity of the rights or as the cause of them. But it is in truth both the beginning and the end of all right.

Law starts from the self-consciousness of the individual, and it cannot rest satisfied till the whole human race, including each individual member, becomes conscious of its unity.1

The idea of person, though implicit in the whole progress of law, is always the last to be formulated. This process of self-realisation has been going on both in the race and in the individual. It is a struggle of nations and individuals for freedom, self-government, autonomy. In municipal law this is the peculiar value of the history of Roman law. For example, in Rome the plebeians had no connubium with the patricians, and later the Latins had none with the cives Romani; in fact we may read the whole history of Roman law as a struggle for a wider meaning of the word "person," which only reached something like our modern idea in the days of Justinian. Again, in old German law there was a doctrine as to misalliances similar to the Roman one just referred to. The German serfs, in the times of the Leges Barbarorum, could not enter into the contract of deposit, and in very recent times the privilege of drawing a bill of exchange was restricted to special privileged classes,2 while in our own country, down to about the beginning of this

1It is only the other day (November, 1883) that the Chinese government issued a manifesto to the world that France was wrong in the quarrel then pending. Truly a revolution since 1856, but it is a little humiliating that a European state should be the aggressor.

2 Zopfl, Rechtsphilosophie, p. 94.

century, we had miners astricted, like slaves, to the soil. Until within the last two years, the legal ideas which regulated the relation of husband and wife were originally drawn from the law of property. Again, we may find an illustration of the same progress in the history of our constitution. The Revolution settled finally the question as to the king being the state, while the Catholic Emancipation and Jewish Disabilities Acts, the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867-68, and the Naturalisation Act of 1870, each gave a wider signification to the word "citizen." In like manner we have the creation of the new Germanic Empire, and the kingdom of Italy, and the recent movements in the East of Europe, all illustrating the same tendency of nations to become conscious of unity, and realise their freedom. Law is thus a realisation of free-will. It is the idea of freedom clothing itself in a sensuous form, which, in the individual, becomes the idea of person, and, in the group of individuals, becomes that of the state.

As this is a process, it is quite incompetent to arrest the individual or the group at any stage, and analyse this entity as if it contained its whole nature. This is what Austin has done on the universal side. He takes modern law as a complete entity, and analyses it without asking how it has arrived at this stage, and so the historical jurists have been compelled to reject or modify his theoretical conclusions. It is just as fallacious to analyse psychologically the