quipping his son, the liability to his guardianship in minority, and
many other similar incidents of tenure, must have been literally
borrowed from the relations of Patron and Freedman under Roman law,
that is, of quondam-master and quondam-slave. But then it is known
that the earliest beneficiaries were the personal companions of the
sovereign, and it is indisputable that this position, brilliant as it
seems, was at first attended by some shade of servile debasement. The
person who ministered to the Sovereign in his Court had given up
something of that absolute personal freedom which was the proudest
privilege of the allodial proprietor.

CHAPTER IX

THE EARLY HISTORY OF CONTRACT

There are few general propositions concerning the age to which we
belong which seem at first sight likely to be received with readier
concurrence than the assertion that the society of our day is mainly
distinguished from that of preceding generations by the largeness of
the sphere which is occupied in it by Contract. Some of the phenomena
on which this proposition rests are among those most frequently
singled out for notice, for comment, and for eulogy. Not many of us
are so unobservant as not to perceive that in innumerable cases where
old law fixed a man's social position irreversibly at his birth,
modern law allows him to create it for himself by convention; and
indeed several of the few exceptions which remain to this rule are
constantly denounced with passionate indignation. The point, for
instance, which is really debated in the vigorous controversy still
carried on upon the subject of negro servitude, is whether the status
of the slave does not belong to bygone institutions, and whether the
only relation between employer and labourer which commends itself to
modern morality be not a relation determined exclusively by contract.
The recognition of this difference between past ages and the present
enters into the very essence of the most famous contemporary
speculations. It is certain that the science of Political Economy, the
only department of moral inquiry which has made any considerable
progress in our day, would fail to correspond with the facts of life
if it were not true that Imperative Law had abandoned the largest part
of the field which it once occupied, and had left men to settle rules
of conduct for themselves with a liberty never allowed to them till
recently. The bias indeed of most persons trained in political e