1. The student of Natural Law does not share the vulgar prejudice against civil law and lawyers. He knows it for a precept of the Natural Law, that there should be a State set up, and that this State should proceed to positive legislation. This legislation partly coincides with Natural Law in urging the practice of that limited measure of morality, which is necessary for the State to do its office and to be at all. (s. x., n. 2, p. 355.) This partial enforcement of the Law of Nature is the main work of the criminal law of the State. But State legislation goes beyond the Natural Law, and in the nature of things must go beyond it. Natural Law leaves a thousand conflicting rights undetermined, which in the interest of society, to save quarrels, must be determined one way or another. 2. An illustration. It is an axiom of Natural Law, that _res perit domino_; that is, the owner bears the loss. If an article under sale perishes before delivery, the loss falls, apart from contracts to the contrary, upon whichever of the two parties is the owner at the time. So far nature rules. But who is the owner at any given time, and at what stage of the transaction does the dominion pass? That can only be settled by custom and the law of the land. "If I order a pipe of port from a wine-merchant abroad; at what period the property passes from the merchant to me; whether upon delivery of the wine at the merchant's warehouse; upon its being put on shipboard at Oporto; upon the arrival of the ship in England at its destined port; or not till the wine be committed to my servants, or deposited in my cellar; all are questions which admit of no decision but what custom points out." (Paley, _Mor. Phil_., bk. iii., p. i, c. vii.) This leads us to remark upon the much admired sentence of Tacitus, _in corruptissima republica plurimae leges_, that not merely the multitude of transgressions, but the very complexity of a highly developed civilization, requires to be kept in order by a vast body of positive law. 3. Incidentally we may also remark, that the law of the State does not create the right of property; otherwise, abolishing its own creation, the State could bring in Communism, (c. vii., s. i., p. 278). But finding this right of property unprotected and undetermined, the State by its criminal law protects property against robbers, and by its _civil_ as distinguished from _criminal_ law, it defines numerous open questions between possessors as to manner of acquirement and conditions of tenure.