but still more clearly in the struggle between the civil authority and the ecclesiastical, wherein the latter endeavours to maintain its inviolable privileges, its exceptional tribunals, its supremacy even in causes civil and political. IX. In the statutes therefore, we find four different legislations, contending, as it were, with one another: the Longobard, the Roman, the Feudal and the Canon law. These, however, may almost be reduced to two, seeing that feudal law is Germanic, and canon law, in so far as it affects the statutes, is mainly Roman. So that here again we are met by the old hostility between Germans and Latins. The two races are opposed, as also their institutions, laws, and ideas; their minds seem to challenge one another wherever they meet, whether in the field of letters, politics, or art. Yet each has need of the other, and both must disappear to make way for a new social system and a more comprehensive spirit which, resulting from the fusion of two warring elements, will remain sole victor in this prolonged contest. In Italy, however, the Latin strain always predominates, as we see even in the statutes, wherein Roman law forms the keystone of the whole juridical structure. [Illustration: EMPEROR JUSTINIAN. (_From a Mosaic, Ravenna._) [_To face page 403._] The earliest compilation of the statutes dates from the very time when a knowledge of the _Corpus iuris_ begins to be diffused throughout Italy from the University of Bologna. From that time forth the legislation of Justinian was regarded as an epitome of juridical philosophy, as the law _par excellence_, and is recognised by all our Republics as the common law, the law to be applied whenever the statutes are silent. For this reason that part of the statutes which relates to the civil law is very much less developed than the political part; and for this reason those teachers whose studies have been directed chiefly to civil jurisprudence occupy themselves much more with Roman, canon, feudal, and Longobard law than with the law of the statutes. These they examined, especially at first, rather as a result of the study of the Roman law, than as deserving careful attention on their own account; they regarded them as the written expression of popular custom to which no great scientific value could be attached, as something outside the one legal system which alone merited universal admiration. A long period elapsed before writers on law began to apply their minds to the consideration of the statutes, the great importance of which has been only completely recognised in our day. Venice is perhaps the only Commune in which it was customary, in the absence of statutory provisions, to appeal to natural reason: whence Bartolo's remark that the Venetian magistrate gave judgment _manu regia et arbitrio suo_.[377] But even in Venice such decisions must always have been inspired or guided by a knowledge and admiration of the Roman law.