There may be an objection to this effect: we have no use for such doctrine. It means to put subjective feeling above law. Arbitrary judgment would rule in place of law, and that is precisely what a litigant will tolerate least of all. If such execrable principles were followed, insupportable uncertainty of law would be the result. Perhaps somebody might refer to Gustav Rumelin, who says in an address on the idea of justice:6

"No doubt the ideal of justice would be to consider and decide each case requiring the intervention of public authority by itself, in the light of all the surrounding special circumstances and characteristics. For each case is of a specific, individual nature. Not one is precisely like some other and therefore capable of being subsumed under some previously established rule with infallible certainty. If we were to imagine to ourselves a divine administration of justice, we should not doubt that such would be its procedure. It would not need a collection of general rules. But,"-Rumelin continues,-"this ideal is entirely unattainable for human purposes, and therefore is to be rejected."

Nor do I propose to claim for the German judge any such godlike authority. For one thing, one may rest assured that the 2385 sections of the Civil Code, together with 1048

6 "Reden und Aufsatze," new series (1881), p. 197.

Yet, it would seem to appear with sufficiency from the textbooks, commentaries, and collections of decisions, that notwithstanding the plenitude of positive statutes, the current of ever-changing life produces day by day cases that do not permit a direct or unquestionable application of a statutory provision. For it is the exclusive purpose of all these books, by the side of the positive statutes, to formulate additional maxims and principles not to be found in the words of any statute, to deduce from the written text new rules, supplementary rules, exceptions, and thus to guide us to that correct, practical administration of justice which is the goal of all legal science. Whether the law that has thus been derived from positive statutes by means of interpretation and maxims or principles believed to be true, and maintained as such, is really calculated to promote and increase the rule of justice, must be tested in the last analysis by such administration of justice.