rocity in rights and duties which have their
origin in the Family. It is Contract. Starting, as from one terminus
of history, from a condition of society in which all the relations of
Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem to have
steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all these
relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals. In Western
Europe the progress achieved in this direction has been considerable.
Thus the status of the Slave has disappeared--it has been superseded
by the contractual relation of the servant to his master. The status
of the Female under Tutelage, if the tutelage be understood of persons
other than her husband, has also ceased to exist; from her coming of
age to her marriage all the relations she may form are relations of
contract. So too the status of the Son under Power has no true place
in law of modern European societies. If any civil obligation binds
together the Parent and the child of full age, it is one to which only
contract gives its legal validity. The apparent exceptions are
exceptions of that stamp which illustrate the rule. The child before
years of discretion, the orphan under guardianship, the adjudged
lunatic, have all their capacities and incapacities regulated by the
Law of Persons. But why? The reason is differently expressed in the
conventional language of different systems, but in substance it is
stated to the same effect by all. The great majority of Jurists are
constant to the principle that the classes of persons just mentioned
are subject to extrinsic control on the single ground that they do not
possess the faculty of forming a judgment on their own interests; in
other words, that they are wanting in the first essential of an
engagement by Contract.

The word Status may be usefully employed to construct a formula
expressing the law of progress thus indicated, which, whatever be its
value, seems to me to be sufficiently ascertained. All the forms of
Status taken notice of in the Law of Persons were derived from, and to
some extent are still coloured by, the powers and privileges anciently
residing in the Family. If then we employ Status, agreeably with the
usage of the best writers, to signify these personal conditions only,
and avoid applying the term to such conditions as are the immediate or
remote result of agreement, we may say that the movement of the
progressive societies has hitherto been a movement _from Status to
Cont