Maitland had followed with unflagging interest and steady enthusiasm the great outburst of legal literature in Germany which preceded the construction of the German Civil Code. Of the Code itself he wrote that "it was the most carefully considered statement of a nation's law that the world has ever seen"; while he found in the legal debate of the Germanist and Romanist schools work which sometimes showed "a delicacy of touch and a subtlety of historical perception," of which Englishmen, "having no pressing need for comparison," could know little. For the purpose which Maitland had in view, the explanation of the way in which Englishmen had conceived of group life in its various embodiments, this subtle and delicate treatment of the forms of legal thought, this "ideal morphology" of the Germans, was no less full of suggestion than the ample historical science with which it was supported. It provided tests, and suggested those points of analogy and contrast between English and German development, which give to Maitland's treatment of the Corporate and Unincorporate Body the quality of an original discourse upon the legal and political theory of Western Europe.
Nor was the interest of the subject merely speculative. Maitland was a practical lawyer with a genius for detecting the source of bad law and bad administration in confused modes of thinking about ultimate questions. Looking for the moment at the English law concerning Corporations through the spectacles of a German realist, he detected as the principal offence against jurisprudence "a certain half-heartedness in our treatment of unincorporate groups." We were unwilling to recognise trades-unions for example as persons, while we made fairly adequate provision for their continuous life. The consequence of this half-heartedness was felt in the domain of public administration as well as in the domain of private law. Englishmen had accepted "a bad and foreign theory, which coupling corporateness with princely privilege refused to recognise and call forth into vigour the bodiliness that was immanent in every township." The Americans had been less pedantic and had permitted the New England town to develop its inherent corporateness. We, on the contrary, influenced by the Concession theory of the Corporation, had shrunk from declaring the village to be a legal person, the subject of rights and the object of gifts. The consequences of this fatal blunder were not measurable merely in terms of administrative symmetry; but so measured they were very great. No one knew better than Maitland the "appalling mess" of English local government. He had described its broader features in _Justice and Police_; he analysed certain underlying sources of confusion in _Township and Borough_. In his Introduction to Gierke's _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_ he was disposed to ascribe no small part of this confusion to the timidity "tardily redressed by the invention of Parish Councils" which had stood between the English village and legal personality.