conomy
is to consider the general truth on which their science reposes as
entitled to become universal, and, when they apply it as an art, their
efforts are ordinarily directed to enlarging the province of Contract
and to curtailing that of Imperative Law, except so far as law is
necessary to enforce the performance of Contracts. The impulse given
by thinkers who are under the influence of these ideas is beginning to
be very strongly felt in the Western world. Legislation has nearly
confessed its inability to keep pace with the activity of man in
discovery, in invention, and in the manipulation of accumulated
wealth; and the law even of the least advanced communities tends more
and more to become a mere surface-stratum having under it an
ever-changing assemblage of contractual rules with which it rarely
interferes except to compel compliance with a few fundamental
principles or unless it be called in to punish the violation of good
faith.

Social inquiries, so far as they depend on the consideration of legal
phenomena, are in so backward a condition that we need not be
surprised at not finding these truths recognised in the commonplaces
which pass current concerning the progress of society. These
commonplaces answer much more to our prejudices than to our
convictions. The strong disinclination of most men to regard morality
as advancing seems to be especially powerful when the virtues on which
Contract depends are in question, and many of us have almost
instinctive reluctance to admitting that good faith and trust in our
fellows are more widely diffused than of old, or that there is
anything in contemporary manners which parallels the loyalty of the
antique world. From time to time, these prepossessions are greatly
strengthened by the spectacle of frauds, unheard of before the period
at which they were observed, and astonishing from their complication
as well as shocking from criminality. But the very character of these
frauds shows clearly that, before they became possible, the moral
obligations of which they are the breach must have been more than
proportionately developed. It is the confidence reposed and deserved
by the many which affords facilities for the bad faith of the few, so
that, if colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no surer
conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the average of
the transactions which, in the particular case, have supplied the
delinquent with his opportunity.