If this reception was a movement which brought about a greater unity in the form and substance of the laws of Western Europe, there was another factor at work which tended in the opposite direction. The claims of the Empire to universal authority become more and more unreal: the claims of the Pope are either rejected entirely, or the ecclesiastical sphere is strictly delimited. The State becomes sovereign. For this purpose it makes no difference whether it is a High Court of Parliament or an absolute monarch which is the supreme authority: law comes to be thought of as the command of a sovereign person or assembly. 'No law', we are told, 'can be unjust', for law is the standard of justice, and there is no other standard by which the justice of law can be measured. The fact that there is in every State a sovereign power which can make and unmake the law at its pleasure makes possible the creation of a uniform law for all the subjects of a State, and so far as the State coincides with the nation, makes for the creation of a national unity in law. Thus Frederick the Great gave a code to Prussia, thus Napoleon gave France a code which swept away the diversities of the provincial customs; yet it served more than merely national purposes, for it found its way not only into the countries conquered by him, where it survived his conquests, but even into lands where he never held sway. Our French fellow-citizens in Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law. It took longer before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law. The very strength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleon stood for a time in the way of codification. The great German lawyer of that time, Savigny, thought of national law as a half-unconscious product of the national feeling of right. The Code of Napoleon had been a revolutionary code, founded (imperfectly, no doubt) on the doctrines of the rights of man; codification for Germany would mean the adoption of something abstract, not specifically national. It was only a century of extraordinary fruitful learned activity, bringing with it at the same time a new and intense study of the Roman law, and a revival of the knowledge and application of the native conceptions of law, that made possible the German civil code which came into force fifteen years ago.