the precedent was not
followed, it fell into complete desuetude, and it remained for the
case of Springhead Spinning Company _v_. Riley,[1] decided as late as
1868, to extend the injunction process to the prohibition of a strike.
And in more recent labor cases it has been found that the line between
prohibiting a man from leaving his employment, even under peculiar
circumstances, and ordering him to proceed with his contract
of employment and to carry it out, is extremely fine, if not
indistinguishable.[2]

[Footnote 1: L.R. 6 Eq. 551.]

[Footnote 2: For instance, the injunction against the employees of the
Southern California Railroad requiring defendants to perform all
their regular and accustomed duties "so long as they remain in the
employment of the company" (62 Fed. 796), has always been severely
criticised.]

Now, the reason of this great principle (peculiar, I think, to
Anglo-Saxon law) lies at its very root. It is the principle of
personal liberty again. To English notions, and to English courts,
indefinite labor continued for an indefinite time, or applied to an
indefinite number of services, is indistinguishable from slavery; and
compulsory labor even under a definite labor contract, such as to work
for a week or a month or a year, or in limited directions, as, for
instance, to work at making shoes or weaving cloth, when enforced by
the strong arm of the law, smacked too much of slavery to be tolerable
by our ancestors. Thus it is that, alone of all contracts, if a man
sign an agreement to work for us to-day, he may break it to-morrow and
will not be compelled to perform it; our only redress is to sue him
for damages, and this again because we can only act under the common
law. Chancery at this point at least is forbidden to take cognizance
of matters affecting personal liberty and labor; and the common law,
as has been said, "sounds only in damages." It is only chancery that
can compel a man to do or not to do some thing or to carry out a
contract.

The other basic principle affecting all questions of labor law is that
of freedom of trade or labor, correlative to the principle of freedom
of contract as to property right, and, indeed, embodying that notion
also. That is to say (perhaps I should say, to repeat) that an
Englishman, an American, has a right to labor where and for whom and
at what he will, and freely to make contract for such labor, and
freely to exercise all trades, and not to be combined