CHAPTER XVII: FREE LABOUR AND CONTRACT.

§ 808. The beginning of this chapter is but nominally distinguishable from the end of the last, since the stage there described passes insensibly into the stage to be described here. By as much as cooperation ceases to be compulsory, by so much does it become voluntary; for if men act together they must do it either willingly or unwillingly. Or, to state the fact in the language of Sir Henry Maine, the members of a society may be united under relations of status, prescribing and enforcing their graduated positions and duties, or, in the absence of these relations of status, they must fall into relations of contract—relations determined by their agreements to perform services for specified payments.

Hence, if social life is to go on at all, it is a necessity that as fast as the one system of cooperation decreases the other system must increase. Here we have to trace as well as we can the incidents of the transition.

§ 809. Under certain of its forms contract arises in early stages. As soon as the reciprocal making of gifts has passed into barter (vol. ii., pp. 99, 668 and § 754) every transaction of exchange implies a momentary contract: it is understood that for a thing given some other thing will be given in return. If there is an interval between the two acts there arises a more obvious bargain, tacit though unspecified. In a kindred manner, among the uncivilized and semi-civilized, occur agreements for services. When, as occasionally happens, Edition: current; Page: [494] one who is building a dwelling or gathering a crop is helped by his neighbours, it is on the implied understanding that help equivalent to that rendered will be afterwards rendered to each of these neighbours: there is an agreement to pay services for services. And then if one who does not need such future services takes instead of them some concrete object offered, we have a commencement of payment for labour—we have an undeveloped form of the contract to give work for wages.

Thus early initiated in a few cases, development of contract is impeded in many ways: some of them remaining to be noted along with those already noted. At first, besides the women, there are only warriors and enslaved captives. The man who can be hired for wages does not exist. Again, payments must be made in commodities, mostly inconvenient to divide, and their values must be arbitrarily estimated. Even when some kind of currency has arisen there cannot be any standard payment for labour until after the hiring of labour has become general. Then there are the moral impediments. Not to be a warrior is dishonorable, and to do the work which slaves commonly do is a disgrace. So that even when there come to be men who work for wages, there is great resistance to the growth of the class. It is true that among the absolutely peaceful Eskimo, men who are unskilful sealers, or who have been impoverished perhaps by loss of their kayaks, fall into the condition of assistants to others who are better off; but even here there is loss of reputation—an implied inferiority and a consequent aversion to working in return for sustenance.

Spite of difficulties, however, the higher institution grows. Among some partially civilized races who have serfs there are also free labourers. Thus, in Tahiti, according to Ellis, “the inferior chiefs generally hired workmen, paying them a given number of pigs, or fathoms of cloth;” while, among the Samoans, who have no servile classes, it is said of a master carpenter that “whenever this person goes to work, he has in Edition: current; Page: [495] his train some ten or twelve who follow him, some as journey-men, who expect payment from him.”

But like many other institutions the institution of free labour or hired labour, in its developed form, arises indirectly as a sequence of social aggregation caused by conquests, occurring after there has been reached an agricultural state and a growth of population. The process is one which, while it consolidates groups, incidentally produces a class of detached individuals. We have evidence that this happened among ancient peoples. Though work among them was mostly done by slaves, yet some of it was done by freemen. Hired labour was customary with the Egyptians, according to Ebers. “Ethiopians ‘who want to be hired’ were freely admitted on the southern frontier.” Brugsch says that in addition to the slave-population “a whole world of busy artisans worked for daily wages.” There is evidence that in Babylonia, too, the same institution existed. On a table of laws it is said:—“A certain man’s brother-in-law hired [workmen] and built an inclosure on his foundation.” So, likewise, was it among the Hebrews. The hiring of servants, or working men, for long periods is frequently alluded to, e. g., Ecclus. vii. 20, xxxvii. 11, and elsewhere; and in Deuteronomy xxiv. 14, there is the injunction—“Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates.” And that besides the ruling classes and the slave-classes in Greece and Rome, there existed free classes containing labourers, is manifest on remembering that in Athens a considerable part of the population consisted of immigrant foreigners carrying on commerce, and that in Rome, beyond the class of freemen proper, some of whom must have been by impoverishment reduced to the working class, there were also the freed-men, the mass of whom, of course, had no alternative but to maintain themselves by use of head or hands.

§ 810. Various origins of the free labouring class must be set down; some of them having large shares in producing it and others small shares.

The first, and perhaps the most general, is the purchasing of their freedom by slaves. In various parts of the world the permission given the slave to accumulate property led to this: the property being eventually used by him to ransom himself. It was thus among the Hebrews. It was so too among the Romans; where, as we have seen, the use of the peculium for purchase of freedom was well recognized. Nor was it otherwise among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Of course the self-ransomed, and afterwards their children, continually augmented the class of free labourers.

To those who bought their freedom must be added those who received it gratis. We have seen that with the Hebrews emancipation was provided for by law—at any rate in case of slaves of Hebrew blood. In Rome, likewise, it became common: and under Constantine a religious ceremony sanctifying it was established. During later times in Europe it occurred also: the liberation of slaves came to be regarded as an act of pious sacrifice. If, very generally in mediæval days, slavery was held justifiable, yet there evidently co-existed in some the thought that the holding of a man in bondage is not entirely right. Hence came manumissions made by will, in which, “for the good of his soul,” or “to make his peace with God,” a master liberated his slaves. At a later time this motive furthered the manumission of serfs also.

Emancipations which thus had other-worldliness for their motive, eventually had worldliness also for their motive. It was discovered that the labour of a bondman, whether slave or serf, was unprofitable, that commuting his services for money was a gainful transaction, and that the exchange of wages for work was a still more gainful transaction. Considering how little, on the average, men are influenced by other motives than self-interests, we may conclude that this Edition: current; Page: [497] economic cause for growth of the free class was a chief cause.

Under some conditions the self-interests of feudal lords put an end to serfdom in a very prompt way. Serfs ceased to have the obligations of tenants because they were evicted. Their partial servitude was abolished in the act of abolishing their part of ownership of land. This process went on extensively in Germany. Already in the 16th century it had commenced, and it assumed in later times very large proportions: being in some cases regulated in the interests of the landowners by statute. In Mecklenburg, between 1621 and 1755, the number of baronial serfs had been reduced from 12,000 to 5,000. Inama-Sternegg writes:—

In England, early in the 16th century, the power of landlords, little checked by the power of the people, brought about in some cases similar results. Partly enclosure of commons, with consequent inadequate pasturage, which disabled tenants from cultivating their fields properly, partly the turning of them out for non-fulfilment of nominal obligations, caused numerous detachments of men from the land. Professor Cunningham remarks that the agricultural distresses of the time “bring the period of manorial economy to an end, for the traces of serfdom which crop up at intervals before this time may now be said to cease; the wholesale evictions of those days put an end to the astriction of labourers to the soil, and thus helped to swell the numbers of the tramps who infested the country.” In the case of England, however, it must be added that this process of detachment from the land had been preceded by a process of re-attachment to it and diminished freedom. When, after the depopulation due to the Black Death, labourers became scarce and landowners were unable to cultivate their estates, laws were passed to enforce the taking of lower wages. There Edition: current; Page: [498] presently resulted a peasants’ revolt which was put down by force, and there followed a temporary re-institution of serfdom. Says Cunningham:—

And here we may recognize the actions and reactions which, in societies as in other aggregates, produce rhythmical movements—the rise of free copyholders, the return of them to a partial serfdom, and again a decay of this serfdom, to be followed as we shall see by another partial return to it.

Beyond the emancipations of serfs arising in these ways more or less gradually, there were in some cases wholesale emancipations arising suddenly. In France, for example,—

Moreover, Philip Augustus, to strengthen himself against the feudal aristocracy, further facilitated enfranchisement—

The result was that presently tenants refused to redeem themselves from their lords by ransom.

But the lapse of serfdom was not complete. There remained serious restrictions of freedom on those who had become possessors of the lands they had been tied to. France furnishes evidence. Over considerable areas of it the peasant-proprietor, now cultivating his small freehold (to which he often joined an additional portion as a tenant), and now working as a labourer for hire, was under various obligations to his seigneur. There were in some cases corvées or labour-rents; there were tolls to be paid at fairs and markets; there were payments to be made for grinding his corn, crushing his grapes, and baking his bread, at the mill, winepress, and oven belonging to the seigneur; and there were fines on Edition: current; Page: [499] occasional sales of lands, as well as irredeemable quit-rents. These burdens and restraints pressed so heavily on the peasant-proprietor as often to make his portion of land not worth cultivating; so that before the Revolution large tracts of France, made valueless partly in these ways and partly by imperial taxation, had been abandoned and were covered with wild vegetation. Of course there resulted a large addition to the detached population. Though in England such processes do not seem to have operated in large measure to increase the class of free labourers, yet they probably operated in some measure.

To these major causes must be added minor causes, some of which have been at work from the earliest days. As soon as there arises chieftainship there arise fugitives—men who, ill-used by one chief, escape and join some other. Among the Abipones the subordination is very slight.

Similarly of the Patagonians we are told—

And of the Bechuanas Livingstone says:—

These actions, common in low social states, foreshadow some that happen throughout all higher social stages. The same motive which, throughout feudal days, led men-at-arms to leave their native places and change their allegiance, or take service abroad, of course operated on the lower ranks. In Russia, for instance, serfs occasionally deserted one petty prince or boyar for another whose treatment was not so hard; Edition: current; Page: [500] and in days of perpetual internal quarrels, there was everywhere a motive on the part of a local potentate to accept additions to his forces. Of course immigrants, not bound to the soil, were usually subject to less servile conditions, and became a semi-free class. Then, again, there must ever have been additions to the free class from the unacknowledged illegitimate children of higher classes; and larger increments must have been supplied by unsuccessful copyholders who had parted with their lands, as well as by the children of copyholders for whom there was no room. In our own days we see recruits to the labouring classes continually arising in kindred ways.

§ 811. Let us now contemplate the position of the free rural class which, in the slow course of ages, was produced in these various ways—by purchase of freedom, by gift of freedom, by commutation of dues and services, by eviction of semi-servile tenants, by immigration of fugitives, by impoverishment of small free tenants, by multiplication of their children, and by the addition of bastards derived from higher ranks. Let us, I say, look at the condition of the class thus constituted. It will suffice if we consider the case of our own peasantry.

To remedy the evils which had arisen from the production of a large unemployed mass of discharged soldiers and serving-men, added to by the evicted tenants named above and by the dependents of suppressed monasteries, stringent laws were passed. These had the effect of reducing to a semi-servile state, multitudes of mendicants and others who had been brought to a wandering life by the unjust dealings of feudal lords and by royal greediness—especially by that of Henry VIII, who in such various ways exemplified the criminality of monarchs, and who intensified the prevailing misery by large debasements of coinage. Of the swarms of homeless men thus artificially generated, those who did not die of starvation saved their lives by robbery, for which they Edition: current; Page: [501] were hanged wholesale, or were seized, and by penal enactments forced to serve at fixed rates of wages. This treatment of drifting beggars who had, in fact, been deprived of the means of living by those above them, went, in the time of Edward VI, to the extent of branding them with V or S, as vagrants or slaves. Meanwhile, by successive steps each locality was made responsible for the maintenance of its poor. That is to say, there revived in a qualified way the attachment of men to the soil, and the claim to a share in the produce of the soil. Though nominally free, the labourer was coerced not only by restraints on his locomotion, and by the obligation to accept specified sums for his labour, but by the limitation of his liberty to labour. For he could not choose his occupation; as is shown by a law which enabled a disbanded soldier to work at what he liked.

But the many limitations on freedom in those days cannot be appreciated until we have pictured to ourselves the social régime then passing away by slow steps. The groups out of which large societies have been compounded, are now so completely amalgamated that we have difficulty in imagining the degree of discreteness which once existed, and the traits which resulted from separateness of parts. The original antagonisms long survived in such ways that each simple group defended itself against other simple groups, and each compound group against other compound groups. Be it in the Highland clan, the Irish sept, the Welsh tyddin, or the old English mark, we see everywhere within the larger societies held together by a central government, these smaller societies held together originally by bonds of blood, and afterwards by other bonds mixed with them. Everywhere there was a reciprocal protection of the members by the group and restraint by the group of its members: the result being that nowhere was the individual really free. Athelstan, when ordering concerning “a lordless man” that they should “find him a lord in the folk-moot,” did but give one of its forms to the general usage; and Edition: current; Page: [502] the command of Edgar “that every man be in surety both within the towns and without the towns,” as well as that of Edward the Confessor that “all men are bound to be in a guarantee by tens, so that if one of the ten men offend the other nine may hold him to right,” illustrate that universal system of bail in early days, under which, instead of the family-group protecting and coercing its members, there came groups otherwise formed doing the like. And in spite of the changes progressing through the centuries, social relations of allied kinds persisted; so that while each man belonged to a manor or parish, the manor or parish was responsible for him.

Surviving usages suggest that after the labourer had become nominally free, there continued, in the farmer’s household, usages which faintly simulated those of lord and vassal. For as the old patriarchal relations were repeated in the baronial hall, where superiors, seated higher, took their meals along with their dependents; so, in the farm house, even down to recent days, the labourers were members of the family, in so far that they boarded with it and were under family government: such of them as were not married being probably provided with sleeping places in out-houses. And some such arrangement was in large measure needful during turbulent times, when safety was sought in mutual protection.

The freedom of the rural labourer has indeed long remained much qualified, and appears to be so still in some districts. Already I have quoted Mr. Jefferies’ account showing that the complete subordination of sons to fathers continued among farmers in certain parts of the country down to generations still surviving; and he points out that a kindred coercion was simultaneously exercised over those the farmer employed.

Thus we may perceive that the perfectly independent peasant has come into existence only in our days.

§ 812. More rapid changes went on in the towns—changes which were at first much the same, for in early days urban life and rural life were not distinguished as they are now. Towns having very generally been formed by the clustering of houses round the strongholds of nobles, their inhabitants were as much under feudal control as were residents in the surrounding country. But the acquisition of freedom by them was in various ways rendered easier; and we may conclude that it was specially facilitated in towns which were not dominated by castles.

Taking up the thread of the argument broken off in the last section, we may consider first the condition of immigrant serfs. These, after a specified period, could not be reclaimed, and became nominally free. But they were not practically free; for, with modification, the urban régime was akin to the rural régime. The escaped villein entering a town as a stranger without means, without protection, and without standing in a court of justice, had no alternative but to put himself under some well-to-do citizen and accept a qualified servitude in return for safety. Unable to carry on any business, unable even to work as a journeyman until he had passed through an apprenticeship, he must either starve or submit to any conditions imposed, however hard. Moreover, besides free handicraftsmen there were bond-handicraftsmen—men not yet emancipated from feudal control. Brentano writes:—

This statement is made with respect to places abroad in which the inhabitants at large were under feudal government; Edition: current; Page: [504] but in England the emancipation had commenced earlier. Hallam remarks that by escaping to the towns “a large proportion of the peasantry, before the middle of the 14th century, had become hired labourers instead of villeins.” But that these immigrant serfs had to accept a semi-servile condition, we may be sure on observing how comparatively servile was the condition of the indigenous working class.

For beyond the facts that a man could work at any trade only after an apprenticeship, that admission to apprenticeship was practically restricted to the children of gild-brothers, that the apprentice was under the despotic rule of his master, and that when he reached the stage of journeyman he still continued under this domestic control (as even still in Germany), there was the fact that he could enter the gild and become fully free, municipally and industrially, only after payment of fees often intentionally raised beyond his means: the result being that even descendants of burgesses, sometimes debarred from carrying on businesses, were obliged to remain working artisans, subject to legal as well as industrial disabilities.

Nor were the fully free—the members of the gilds themselves—free in the modern sense. A gild was a hierarchy. Below the master and wardens came the class of superiors from whom the governing council was formed; then the mass of those who were masters authorized to take work; beneath them the trained assistants; and to keep the commonalty under the despotic rule of the chief men, the elective system was designed so as in large measure to deprive them of power. Moreover the ordinary gild-member, under this oligarchic rule, could not carry on his business as he pleased. He was subject to restrictions in respect to times, places, prices, and modes of work and so forth. Summing up the results of patient investigations into gild-organization, Mrs. Green says:—“From the very outset its society was based on compulsion.” And then with this semi-militant Edition: current; Page: [505] internal government went semi-militant external obligations. On gild-members or burgesses in fortified places, devolved the building, maintaining, and defending of the walls; and different towers were manned by different crafts. These nominally free townsmen were subject to forced labour not only for purposes of defence but for purposes of improvement—a municipal corvée. And besides having occasionally to fight outer enemies—foreign on the coast and native in the interior—they had to fight inner enemies, bearing arms at their own expense.

Thus in the days when serfs sought refuge in towns, though the régime of contract had qualified the régime of status more in them than in the country, yet the qualification was really not great.

§ 813. Further progress towards free labour was afterwards achieved by a second escape from coercion. Men from the country had sought liberty in the towns and now men from the towns fled for liberty into the country. A petition from Southampton in 1376, quoted by Mrs. Green, complains that “half the people had deserted their homes to escape the intolerable burdens thrown on them, and the rest were going.” Then beyond the exodus thus prompted, there was another prompted by desire to avoid gild-control. Many artisans were obliged to take oath that after apprenticeship ended they would not set up for themselves without license from the gild. To avoid restraint by residence with masters, they sought to live apart, and in London caused a “scandal” by doing so; just as serfs caused a scandal by escaping from their lords. Thus journeymen were prompted to begin business outside the range of gild-authority. They “set up shops in suburbs or villages,” and some carried their trades to distant towns not under corporate control, such as Birmingham and Manchester. Both processes added to the ranks of the free workers—workers not nominally free only but actually free.

A concomitant effect occurred. Decrease in the prosperity and power of the gilds was followed by disorganization of them. And then their progressive decline was in most cases brought to a sudden end by confiscations of their property. Malefactors reigning by divine right, who impoverished the nation in their unscrupulous pursuit of personal ends, robbed, among other bodies, the gilds, to the extent in most cases of causing their dissolution. Of course a resulting, but unintended, benefit was that of giving to members of gilds, as well as to others, freedom to carry on their businesses as they pleased. The régime of free labour thus was extended.

§ 814. Here we have to retrace our steps and observe the advance from status to contract along another route. While in some countries gilds were dissolving, in other countries house-communities and village-communities were dissolving.

Though need for mutual protection caused cohesion of relations in clusters, there was at work from the beginning a cause of dissolution ready to show its effects as soon as surrounding conditions allowed. Always the diligent and skilful felt annoyance at being unable to profit by their superiorities. They were vexed on seeing the idle taking equal shares of benefit with themselves. Says Sir Henry Maine concerning the South Slavonian house-communities:—

Where peace allowed, disintegration, thus instigated, began long since and has continued; as witness the following passage from Mr. Arthur Evans:—

To like effect is the remark of Kovalevsky:—

As illustrating the truth that the political régime and the industrial régime are fundamentally related, it is interesting to read, in M. de Laveleye’s Primitive Property, a remark showing that this domestic change goes along with the general decline of subordination.

But concerning the dissolution of these groups of kindred, perhaps the clearest conceptions may be extracted from M. Jireček’s account of the house-communities in Bulgaria, of which there now remain but few. Each of these, called a rod or roda (gens), generally bears the name of an ancestor. Now-a-days the leader is elected. He directs the work and life of the community, and represents it in all external transactions. The progressive collapse of them is due partly to frequent internal revolutions—dissatisfaction with leaders and changing of them—and partly to the excursions of members in search of work, and their eventual separation: doubtless caused by the desire to retain what they have earned.

The same essential causes operate in the Indian communities. Mr. Ghosh points out that unlikenesses of character between different tribes, as well as unlikenesses in their occupations, cause different degrees of the tendency to dissolve; but that everywhere the tendency is shown under present peaceful conditions. Pointing to certain reasons for jealousy Edition: current; Page: [508] within the communities, and to the “facilities offered by British Courts to secure separate enjoyment of communal property,” he says:—

And in India, as elsewhere, when once any degree of separate ownership comes to be recognized, the dissolving process begins. Says Sir Henry Maine:—

On remembering that the permission to save a peculium made possible among the Romans, and other peoples, the self-ransoming of slaves, it is instructive to observe that it also leads the way to independence of the communal member. The products of a slave’s labour are owned by his master, and the products of the labour of each unit in a house-community are owned by the community. But just as a slave desires to use his powers as he pleases and to have all that the exercise of them brings him, so desires also a member of a community who gives to it in labour more than he gets in benefits. Each of them wishes to own himself entirely, and each uses the peculium he has acquired to achieve this end.

Finally, however, it must be remarked that the industrial freedom achieved by the masses of men in the various ways above described, still remains incomplete in most countries, and remained incomplete even among ourselves within the memories of living persons. Except in London, an artizan could not carry on any other occupation than that to which he had been apprenticed. It was not until 1814 that this restriction was abolished; and not until 1824 was there complete freedom to emigrate. Moreover, up to that date the artizan was not allowed to travel about the kingdom in search of work.

§ 815. At the opening of this chapter it was pointed out that free labour and contract are correlatives. Having traced out the various origins of the one we have now to observe the concomitant development of the other. As the first implies the last, it is a necessary result that the last has become general and definite in proportion as the first has become so.

Contracts were made in the earliest recorded days of partially civilized peoples, as when Abraham bought the cave of Macpelah (using the currency of adjacent cities). On tablets from Assyria “many contracts have been found for the sale or hire of landed property and slaves.” Not dwelling on earlier cases let us pass on to the case of Rome, where, as Eschenburg says, the members of the trade-gilds, or collegia, “performed work for the state, or for individual citizens, who were not able to hold slaves.” The last clause of this statement is significant as showing that in the early Roman house-communities, work of different kinds was done within the group (as in the house-communities and village-communities of the Hindus and the Teutons) but that when there came to be a non-slaveholding class, contract became necessary. When a house-community has grown into a village-community, and certain members of the multiplying cluster do special kinds of work for the rest, the giving in return so much grain, or the marking off so much ground for cultivation, prefigures contract, but is not contract proper; since the apportionments are arbitrarily fixed by the authority of the group. Contract proper arises only when the work and the payment are voluntarily exchanged; and while, on the one hand, this can happen only when the parties to an agreement are independent, on the other hand when they are independent it must happen.

This new form of cooperation, seeming to us simple and comprehensible, did not originally seem so. The fact that at first barter was not understood by savages, throws light on the fact that in early European days, commercial transactions Edition: current; Page: [510] did not easily become habitual; since family-relations did not involve ideas of exchange. As Prof. Cunningham remarks:—

This last sentence brings into view another factor in the development of contract. Under one of its leading aspects evolution, no matter of what kind, involves change from the indefinite to the definite; and it is thus with measures of quantity, whether of weight, capacity, length, or area. “While primitive tribes may estimate land very roughly by units which have no precise areal value, agriculturists in a highly civilised society desire to have an accurate metric system.” Similarly with other contracts, the habit of exchanging led to precision of measures, and precision of measures facilitated the habit of exchanging. Derived from organic lengths and weights—the cubit, the foot, the carat, the grain—measures became precise and State-authorized only in course of time; and only then did contracts become definite. Only then, too, could the idea of equivalence be made clear by comparing the quantities which different dealers gave in exchange.

For complete development of contract definite measures of value were also needed. We have seen in Chapter VIII how greatly, in early stages, exchange was impeded by absence of a currency. We have seen how a currency, at first consisting of leading articles of consumption, such as cattle, had units of variable worth. When manufactured articles—weapons, tools, cloth,—became media of exchange, indefiniteness still characterized prices. After weights of metal were employed as money, differences in the standards of Edition: current; Page: [511] weight made valuations of exchangeable things more or less vague. Even when stamped coins came into use, the minting in various places by various persons, entailed unlikenesses in the amounts of metal; and after State-coinage had replaced other coinages, debasement re-introduced indefiniteness. Only in modern times have trustworthy currencies given precision to contracts; and even still, in various places, depreciated paper-currencies interfere with this precision.

Still another factor has to be recognized. In days before writing was prevalent, and when men’s promises were less to be trusted than now, contracts had that kind of indefiniteness which takes the form of uncertainty. Hence hindrance from the need for witnesses. In Anglo-Saxon times—

And at later dates there were State-appointed officials in markets before whom bargains were made and exchanges effected; as during early days in the East.

Finally, for the development of contract, human nature has to undergo appropriate modifications. In low stages not only are all things, all transactions, all ideas, inexact, but there is a dislike of exactness. The uneducated have a positive love of indefiniteness: witness the resistance of cooks to use of weights and measures, and their preference for handfuls and pinches. In the East at the present day, where implements are rude and the lines, curves, and surfaces of industrial products are never quite true, all things are indefinite. Like our own in ancient times, the narrow streets are extremely irregular; the unmetalled roads are without boundaries; after long bargaining articles are sold for half as much as was asked; and there is repugnance to distinct agreements. Negotiation with a dragoman has to be Edition: current; Page: [512] cautiously managed lest, if an attempt be made forthwith to bind him, he may go off in a huff; and, meanwhile presents are given and received: there being in this way curiously shown the broken traces of the aboriginal form of exchange. Even among ourselves we may see both this survival of presents, and this love of indefiniteness, in trading of the lower kinds—in the “baker’s dozen,” in “heaped-up” measures, in the “one in for luck.” And the contrast between such transactions and those of a bank, where accounts are balanced to a penny, shows the difference between undeveloped contract and contract in its developed stages.

So that while, in the course of social progress from involuntary cooperation to voluntary cooperation, free labour and contract develop together, each making the other possible, the development of each also depends on collateral conditions. Neither can advance without the other, and neither can advance without various other advances. There is not only a mutual dependence of parts in the social organism but also a mutual dependence of influences.