England has never seriously undertaken the work of codification, and its law, uniform and national already in the Middle Ages, has become in the modern world something far wider than a merely national law. The English settlers in the new world brought their law with them. To-day English law, modified no doubt by State and Federal legislation, is the Common Law of the great republic of the United States. The colonies which still remain within our Empire are territories of the English law, save where, as in South Africa or Quebec, civilized settlers had already established and retained their own law. Throughout these lands, it matters little under which flag, an English lawyer finds the Courts speaking a language which he understands. Thus it came about that the world, which derives its civilization from Western Europe, may be divided into lands of the English law, and lands where in outward form at least the law is Roman. And yet we must not make too much of this division. In the first place it cuts across national boundaries. It unites us with the United States of America, it separates us from some of our own colonies while it unites them with continental Europe. In the second place law is, like language, a form of thought; and diversity of form, though it hinders, does not prevent a unity of substance. Among the forces which have made for unity something should be said of the conception of a law of nature. The phrase has been out of fashion in this country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress upon the positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law which they would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word. I am not concerned here to discuss its philosophical validity. But it has never been lost sight of. It is one of the inheritances of the Roman law tradition. Alike in the Middle Ages, and since their close, it has been the subject of speculation and an influence guiding the legislator, the thinker, and the administrator of law. There is a whole literature upon it on the Continent. It bulks pretty largely in Blackstone: you can see its influence on the judges of the eighteenth century in this country; the founders of the American Republic put a good deal of it into their constitution, and American judges will still refer to it without shame. What it really means is a standard by which the law here and now may be judged, a standard founded on the needs of human nature. That the standard becomes a different one, as the needs and possibilities of humanity develop, has not prevented the seeking after such a standard.