The recent annexation to the Empire of the territories of the two Boer Republics must necessarily have many effects not alone in the sphere of politics, but also in that of law. But no unsettling of the general principles of private law, regulating the rights and duties of the citizens in private relations, can be the result. The invariable practice of the Imperial Government--the only possible one to prevent inextricable confusion of personal status and property rights--has always been to enforce, as the unaltered law of the land, any system of European Law already in operation in territories annexed or ceded to the Empire, being already a portion of the dominion of any State of the European Family of Nations. In this respect the Imperial Government but follows the general practice of other European States: a practice so uniform that it may almost be regarded as a portion of the Law of Nations, of that custom of the European race which for a century we are accustomed to speak of as International Law. The committee of the Privy Council, which, as regards the Empire outside of Europe, may be viewed as the Imperial Court of Appeal, has therefore to adjudicate on systems of law more numerous than these that come before any other tribunal in the world. Not alone questions to be determined under the Common Law of England, but suits to be decided under that law, as modified by the legislation of the self-governing Colonies, come under the cognisance of that unique tribunal. From the Channel Islands, whose people boast that they were never conquered by England, are heard appeals, based on the _Grand Coutumier de Normandie_, unknown in France since the French Revolution. The French Law of Lower Canada, still administered under British authority, is lifeless and unknown in the Paris which gave it birth. Similarly the Roman Dutch Law of the United Provinces, now enforced in the former over-sea possessions of Holland, has long ago been swept away in Low Countries, surviving as the law of the land only in the British possessions, in South America, in Ceylon, and in South Africa. With one result, arresting the attention of the historical student, that in our own day British tribunals accept, as of the highest authority--in many matters most vitally affecting the status and property of British citizens from the Lion's Head to the Line, the recorded opinions of a Pretorian prefect of the Roman Empire in York--the brightest of the five stars of the _Loi des Citations_.