Our law, like our language, has flowed from many sources and has been subjected to foreign influence. The colonists carried out with them the English common law, the sources of which "have been stated to be 'as undiscoverable as those of the Nile.'"[67-3] Quite different from this is the common law of Scotland, "based on the principles {68} of the Roman Civil and Canon law as applied and modified by a long series of statutes of the Scots Parliament and decisions of the Scottish courts. . . . A detailed comparison of the differences between the private law of England and Scotland would involve a survey of the whole domain of jurisprudence and would be the work of a lifetime;"[68-1] From 1642 to 1652 occurred the English Civil War, followed by the Commonwealth. In those stormy years which seem, as writes an Australian jurist, "to have anticipated almost every effort of modern political thought, scarcely any cry was more persistently raised by the reform party than the cry for reform of the law. It was the first great period of conscious law reform."[68-2] All the Pan-Angle nations, save only the British Isles and Newfoundland, had the stress of that period reflected in the history of their settlements, or were founded after the results of that war had been produced. In the new countries the legal influence was predominantly British, but in some parts the colonists encountered communities of Europeans of other civilizations and of other legal theories. In Quebec and Louisiana they met French law; in western United States, Spanish; and in South Africa, a form of Roman-Dutch. Being elements in civilizations which only gradually have blended into that of the Pan-Angles, these laws have in greater or less measure survived. But in such {69} localities slowly the foreign law merges into that of the local Pan-Angles. As an example we have South Africa: "The local Dutch statute law was abandoned perforce as obsolescent, and replaced almost entirely by local enactments based upon the existing circumstances of the colony or founded upon English statutes, and the Roman-Dutch common law, broadly speaking, came to be administered concurrently with English common law. Nor was it surprising that, with judges and advocates alike versed in the decisions and practice of the English Courts, English principles were more and more closely woven into the fabric of the Colonial law. And apart from the influence of the 'case-law,' thus built up through the Colonial Reports, circumstances--or rather its greater capacity to satisfy the conditions of modern life--gave the regulation of the field of commercial intercourse almost exclusively to English law."[69-1] A like story might be told of French law in Louisiana. In other instances, where perhaps it receives no official recognition, non-English law has doubtless had its effect on what may be loosely called Pan-Angle law. As long as it suits the people and their needs better, so long a