alike, under the leadership of a single patriotic sovereign. Stein's appeal found little response among his contemporaries. Like a sober man among drunkards, he seemed to be scarcely rational. The simple conception of a nation sacrificing its internal rivalries in order to avert foreign rule was folly to the politicians who had all their lives long been outwitting one another at Vienna or Berlin, or who had just become persons of consequence in Europe through the patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In the changes that followed the Peace of Lunéville the fixity and routine of Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was already beginning to learn the lesson which later events were to teach to the rest of the German race. [France, 1801-1804.] [Civil Code.] Four years of peace separated the Treaty of Lunéville from the next outbreak of war between France and any Continental Power. They were years of extension of French influence in every neighbouring State; in France itself, years of the consolidation of Bonaparte's power, and of the decline of everything that checked his personal rule. The legislative bodies sank into the insignificance for which they had been designed; everything that was suffered to wear the appearance of strength owed its vigour to the personal support of the First Consul. Among the institutions which date from this period, two, equally associated with the name of Napoleon, have taken a prominent place in history, the Civil Code and the Concordat. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the codification of law had been pursued with more or less success by almost every Government in Europe. In France the Constituent Assembly of 1789 had ordered the statutes, by which it superseded the old variety of local customs, to be thus cast into a systematic form. A Committee of the Convention had completed the draft of a Civil Code. The Directory had in its turn appointed a Commission; but the project still remained unfulfilled when the Directory was driven from power. Bonaparte instinctively threw himself into a task so congenial to his own systematising spirit, and stimulated the efforts of the best jurists in France by his personal interest and pride in the work of legislation. A Commission of lawyers, appointed by the First Consul, presented the successive chapters of a Civil Code to the Council of State. In the discussions in the Council of State Bonaparte himself took an active, though not always a beneficial, part. The draft of each chapter, as it left the Council of State, was submitted, as a project of Law, to the Tribunate and to the Legislative Body. For a moment the free expression of