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The Green Bag
ticularly on the basis of the Pandects. The Prussian Landrecht, the Saxon and Austrian civil codes, contain a large
number of legal rules which are directly borrowed from the law of the Pandects." While the Landesrecht, or “Provincial Law," is expressly annulled, an incon
a call for a convention of states to meet at Annapolis, in order to consider the establishment of a uniform commercial
system. When Maryland prompted Vir ginia to take that step, by proposing
main in force, which are, strictly speak ing, “agrarian," because designed for the farmer, for agricultural conditions
that commissioners from all the states should be invited to meet and regulate the restrictions on commerce for the whole, Madison saw at once the advan tage of “a Politico-commercial commis sion” for the continent. The outcome
generally, as well as for the protection
of the meeting at Annapolis was the call
siderable number of its enactments re
of vested rights.
As the farmer and the
for a convention“to meet at Philadelphia
merchant are and have been the two
on the second Monday of the next May
great powers in German history, the
to consider the situation of the United
industrial and agrarian laws that survive may well be compared to the jus civile,
States." All the world now knows that three years and a half prior to the meet ing of the Annapolis convention a pros perous merchant of Philadelphia, Pela tiah Webster, who began as early as
while the laws of the Civil Code may be said to resemble the Roman jus gentium.
The merchant has not inaptly been called “the father of the Civil Code of Germany" because, as commercial inter
1776 to write on the currency, and in 1779 commenced the publication of a
course recognizes no national boundaries,
series of “Essays on Free Trade and
he was naturally the first to desire a
Finance"—put forth, on February 16, 1783, as his invention, the entirely new scheme of federal government embodied in the existing Constitution of the United
homogeneous system of civil rights. It was the mercantile element in the Ger man cities that eventually crushed the
spirit of feudalism; it was the mercantile element that opened the way for an Imperial Code by first creating a uni form system of commercial law. The first modern effort to give unity to law in Germany was made, as a prelude to the movement for natural unity, by the
States. The elaborate and finished essay in which that epoch-making discovery was announced is just as authentic as
the Constitution itself. Just as it may be said that the merchant was “the father of the Civil Code of Germany,” so it
German Bills of Exchange Law (Wech
may be said that a merchant was "the father of the Constitution of the United
selordnung, 1848-1850), while a general Commercial Code (Gemeines Handel: gesetzbuch), enacted in various states be tween 1862 and 1866, was re-enacted for the new Empire in 1871.
tect large space is given to the influence of the merchant. “Merchants," he said, “must from the nature of their business certainly understand the interests and
In juxtaposition with the foregoing statement as to the influence of com
merce upon the unity of law in Germany should be set the fact that the first step towards the making of the existing Con
stitution of the United States was taken in January, 1786, when Virginia issued
States.”
In the plan of the great archi
resources of their country the best of any men in it. . . . Itherefore humbly propose, if the merchants in the several states are disposed to send delegates from their body, to meet and attend the sitting of Congress, that they shall be permitted to form a chamber of com
