Germany’s New Code of Law
The first day of January, 1900, the German Empire abandoned the Code of Roman Law, under which the German people had been held for four hundred years, and adopted a code of her own making, drawn from native German experience, and fitted to the German people. The New York Tribune remarks of this that “it may well be that history will ultimately know William II by no means least as the lawgiving emperor — the sovereign under whose reign the German Empire was at last ‘lapped in universal law’ of German origin.” Much has been said by many persons to discredit the ability and steadiness of the German emperor; but he surprises them all by simply going straight forward, and by his acts quietly disproving it all.