At first, the Institutes,[6226] "by cutting out[6227] what is not applicable to our legislation and replacing these matters by a comparison with much finer laws scattered through other books of Roman law," similar to the classes in the humanities, where Latin literature is reduced to the finest passages of the classic authors.

Next, the French code, with the comments on it due to the decisions of the court of appeals and the court of cassation.[6228] All the courses of lectures of the school shall be obligatory and arranged as a whole, or tacked on to each other in a compulsory order; each step the student takes shall be counted, measured and verified every three months by a certificate, and each year by an examination; at these examinations there shall be no optional matters, no estimate of collateral studies or those of complimentary or superior importance.
The student finds no attraction or benefit in studies outside of the programme, and, in this programme he finds only official texts, explained by the bill of fare, one by one, with subtlety, and patched together as well as may be by means of distinctions and interpretations, so as to provide the understood solution in ordinary cases and a plausible solution in disputed cases, in other terms, a system of casuistry.[6229] And this is just the education which suits the future practitioner.

As a celebrated professor of the second Empire says,[6230] "our young graduates need a system of instruction which enables them to pass without perplexity or discouragement from the school to the halls of justice;" to have the 2281 articles of the civil code at their fingers' ends, also the rest, hundreds and thousands of them, of the other four codes; to find at once in relation to each case the set of pertinent articles, the general rule, neither too broad nor too narrow, which fits the particular case in question.

As for law taken in itself and as a whole, they have none of that clear, full conception of it to which a comprehensive and curious mind aspires.

"I know nothing of the civil code," said another professor, older and in closer proximity with the primitive institution, "I teach only the Code Napoleon." Accordingly, with his clear-sightedness and his practical and graphic imagination, Napoleon could perceive in advance the future and certain products of his machine, the magistrates in their bonnets, seated or standing in their court-rooms, with the lawyers in their robes facing them pleading, and, farther on, the great consumers of stamped papers in their bureaus encumbered with files of documents with the attorneys and notaries engaged in drawing them up; elsewhere, prefects, sub-prefects, prefect councilors, government commissioners and other officials, all at work and doing pretty well, all of them useful organs but mere organs of the law.