The local government of the Visigoths, then, presents still fewer institutions containing any active principle of liberty, any real force of control or resistance, than are found in their political _régime_, and at the centre of the State. Such is, at least, the unavoidable result to which we are led by an examination of the general and definitive code of this nation. This result has appeared so singular, so opposed to German customs, and to the state of things among other peoples of the same origin, that hardly any man of erudition has been willing to read it in the _Forum judicum_; and that those even who have failed to find in this code any proof of the existence of free institutions, and almost any trace of old Barbarian institutions, have striven to discover them elsewhere in Spain at this period. {241} Views Of M. De Savigny. I shall say nothing of Abbé Mariana, who, in his _Teoria de las Cortes_, is determined to discover, in the councils of Toledo, not only the Spanish Cortes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but also all the principles and guarantees of liberty--all, in fine, that constitutes a national assembly and a representative government. I have already demonstrated the moral improbability and the historic unreality of the fact. Two more learned men than Abbé Mariana, and less inclined than he to find what they seek, have thought that they perceive, in the _Forum judicum_, proofs that the purely monarchical system, associated with the theocratic system, did not prevail so completely among the Visigoths; and that they can discover among them evidences of effective and extended public liberties: I refer to M. de Savigny, in his _History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages_, and to a writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, [Footnote 18 ] in an article on _The Gothic Laws of Spain_. I do not think that the researches of these two learned critics destroy the general results which I have just laid before you. They nevertheless contain many curious facts hitherto little noticed, and which throw much light on the study of the political institutions of the Visigothic monarchy. I shall, therefore, make you acquainted with them, and examine the consequences to which they lead. [Footnote 18: Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxi., pp. 94-132.]