ld
it not be required in all contracts? A seal is a mere form, and is
vanishing in the scroll and in enactments that a consideration must be
given, seal or no seal. Why should any merely historical distinction be
allowed to affect the rights and obligations of business men?

Since I wrote this discourse I have come on a very good example of the
way in which tradition not only overrides rational policy, but overrides
it after first having been misunderstood and having been given a new and
broader scope than it had when it had a meaning. It is the settled law
of England that a material alteration of a written contract by a party
avoids it as against him. The doctrine is contrary to the general
tendency of the law. We do not tell a jury that if a man ever has lied
in one particular he is to be presumed to lie in all. Even if a man has
tried to defraud, it seems no sufficient reason for preventing him
from proving the truth. Objections of like nature in general go to the
weight, not to the admissibility, of evidence. Moreover, this rule is
irrespective of fraud, and is not confined to evidence. It is not merely
that you cannot use the writing, but that the contract is at an end.
What does this mean? The existence of a written contract depends on
the fact that the offerer and offeree have interchanged their written
expressions, not on the continued existence of those expressions. But in
the case of a bond, the primitive notion was different. The contract was
inseparable from the parchment. If a stranger destroyed it, or tore off
the seal, or altered it, the obligee count not recover, however free
from fault, because the defendant's contract, that is, the actual
tangible bond which he had sealed, could not be produced in the form in
which it bound him. About a hundred years ago Lord Kenyon undertook to
use his reason on the tradition, as he sometimes did to the detriment of
the law, and, not understanding it, said he could see no reason why what
was true of a bond should not be true of other contracts. His decision
happened to be right, as it concerned a promissory note, where again the
common law regarded the contract as inseparable from the paper on which
it was written, but the reasoning was general, and soon was extended to
other written contracts, and various absurd and unreal grounds of policy
were invented to account for the enlarged rule.

I trust that no one will understand me to be speaking with disrespect
of the l