Montesquieu's scheme is announced in the title originally given to his book. "Of the Spirit of the Laws, or of the relation which the laws should have to the constitution of every government, manners, climate, religion, commerce, etc. To which the author has added new researches into the Roman laws concerning inheritance, into French laws, and into feudal laws." Thus we see that the principal subject of the book is the relation of laws to the circumstances of the country in which they exist. In this also is its chief value and its claim to originality. The Philosophers of the eighteenth century, following the example of the churches, believed that there was an absolute standard of justice to which all laws could easily be referred, independently of the country in which the laws existed. If the laws of Naples differed from those of Prussia, the laws which governed the phlegmatic Dutchman from those which contained the excitable inhabitant of Marseilles, one or the other set of laws, or both of them, must be wrong. The Civil Law of the Latin races, the Common Law of England, each claimed to be the expression of perfect abstract reason. The church with its canon, the same for all races and climates, confirmed the theory. To all these came Montesquieu with a teaching that would reconcile their claims. "Law in general is human reason, in so far as it governs all the nations of the earth; and the political and civil laws of each nation should be but the particular cases to which that human reason is applied." "They should be so adapted to the people for whom they are made, that it is a very great chance if those of one nation will apply to another." "They must be in relation to the nature and the principle of the government which is established, or about to be established; whether they form it, as do political laws; or maintain it, as do civil laws." "They must be in relation to the _physical_ nature of the country; to the frozen, burning, or temperate climate; to the quality of the soil, the situation and size of the country; to the style of life of the people, as farmers, hunters, or shepherds; they should be in relation to the amount of liberty which the constitution may allow; to the religion of the inhabitants, their inclinations, their wealth, their numbers, their customs, their morals, and their manners. Finally, they have relations to each other; they have them to their own origin, to the object of the legislator, to the order of things on which they are established. They should be considered from all these points of view." "This is what I undertake to do in this work. I will examine all these relations. They form together what is called `the Spirit of the Laws.'" [Footnote: Montesq., iii. 99 (liv. i. c. 3).]