To hinder it from returning, the best thing to do was not to repeat the same mistake, not to leave the lodging empty, to install in it a fixed occupant beforehand, and to see that this fixed occupant, which is science, may at all times represent its title of legitimate proprietor, its method analogous to that of the natural sciences, its studies of detail from life and in the texts, its restricted inductions, its concordant verifications, its progressive discoveries.

This in order that, confronting every chance system and without these titles, minds may of themselves shut their doors, or only open them provisionally, and always with a care to make the intruder present his letters of credit: here we have the social service rendered by the instruction in Law as given in the German mode, as Cuvier had just described it.

Before 1789, in the University of Strasbourg, in France, it was thus given; but, in this condition and to this extent, it is not suitable under the new regime, and still less than under the old one.
Napoleon, in his preparation of jurists, wants executants and not critics; his faculties must furnish him with men able to apply and not to give opinions on his laws.

Hence, in the teaching of the law, as he prescribes it, there must be nothing of history, of political economy or of comparative law; there must be no exposition of foreign legislation, of feudal or custom law, or of canon law; no account of the transformations which governed public and private law in Rome down to the Digest[6225] and, after that, in France, down to the recent codes.
But nothing on remote origins, on successive forms and the diverse and ever-changing conditions of labor, property and the family; nothing which, through the law, exposes to view and brings us in contact with the social body to which it is applied.

That is to say, this or that active and human group, with its habits, prejudices, instincts, dangers and necessities; nothing but two dry, rigid codes, like two aerolites fallen from the sky ready-made and all of a piece at an interval of fourteen centuries.