28 Bartolomé Ci.avf.ro already made reference to the fact that Spain was not a federal nation at that time, and no political institutions with legislative power were admitted other than the general ones, the Spanish ones, but this does not mean that Spain was a State of national Law, as it included several regions which maintained another legal system, which was prevalent. 3. According to the Constitution There is only one feature in common with the conception of the Law in other codifications of Napoleonic inspiration: The nation is the frontier; the legal system is national in the sense of boundaries. Inside the nation there can be, and even prevail, legal systems other than the national one, the one of the laws and codes of the nation constituted in a State. But what is not possible, what cannot be conceived by the codification, is that an extranational, and hence supranational. Law exists over the nation in this sense. The legal system is something owned by the nation, however the former is not entirely identified with the latter. We have reached a constitutional point, that of the national closing of the legal ordainment. That was a conception shared by the Spanish codification with others, but that was not a harmonious point in this country. A few years earlier, between 1869 and 1873 to be precise, a constitutional episode of diverse character, of a less national conception of the Law, had been experienced in Spain. It came about not through the direct affirmation of some international order or of a Law thus supranational, but through the simpler postulation of the liberty of the individual as himself without any national requirement for this right as that. In September 1868 a constitutional revolution came about which took seriously individual rights, their conception as basic and effective principles of the ordainment, for which reason precisely this revolution had posed a less nationalistic conception of that ordainment. After 1868 an attempt had been made to substitute the French model by the American one, for its constitutionalismof rights and also, in 1873, for its possibility of judicial control of the laws and for its federalism. This attempt failed institutionally, but not culturally. Throughout the eighteen eighties the codification had to contend with another juridical conception of opposite meaning, which remained alive and vigorous in circles by no means marginal. The most reputable jurists in Spain at the end of nineteenth century oppose the codification and even in its moderated version precisely because this represented an imperative order as contrasted with the liberty of the individuals and of society; they contest the equation between legal system and Law, even in its very softened Spanish version, for the precise reason that it implies a means of political imposition of the ordainment, obstructive of private
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