The market was then the space of neutral ground in which, under the ancient constitution of society, the members of the different autonomous proprietary groups met in safety and bought and sold unshackled by customary rule. Here, it seems to me, the notion of a man's right to get the best price for his wares took its rise, and hence it spread over the world. Market law, I should here observe, has had a great fortune in legal history. The Jus Gentium of the Romans, though doubtless intended in part to adjust the relations of Roman citizens to a subject population, grew also in part out of commercial exigencies, and the Roman Jus Gentium was gradually sublimated into a moral theory which, among theories not laying claim to a religious sanction, had no rival in the world till the ethical doctrines of Bentham made their appearance. If, however, I could venture to detain you with a discussion on technical law, I could easily prove that market law has long exercised and still exercises a dissolving and transforming influence over the very class of rules which are profoundly modifying the more rigid and archaic branches of jurisprudence. The law of personal or movable property tends to absorb the law of land or of immovable property, but the law of movable tends steadily to assimilate itself to the law of the market. The wish to establish as law that which is commercially expedient is plainly visible in the recent decisions of English courts of justice; a whole group of legal maxims having their origin in the law of the market (of which the rule of caveat emptor is the most significant) are growing at the expense of all others which compete with them. . . .

It seems to me that the half-conscious repulsions which men feel to doctrines which they do not deny might often be examined with more profit than is usually supposed. They will sometimes be found to be the reflection of an older law of ideas. Much of the moral opinion is no doubt in advance of law, for it is the fruit of religious or philosophical theories having a different origin from the law and not yet incorporated with it. But a good deal of it seems to me to preserve rules of conduct which, though expelled from law, linger in sentiment or practice. The repeal of the usury laws has made it lawful to take any rate of interest for money, yet the taking of usurious interest is not thought to be respectable, and our courts of equity have evidently great difficulty in bringing themselves to a complete recognition of the new principle. Bearing this example in mind, you may not think it an idle question if I ask: What is the real origin of the feeling that it is not creditable to drive a hard bargain with a near relative or a friend ? It can hardly be said that there is any rule of morality to forbid it. The feeling seems to me to bear the traces of the old notion that men united in natural groups do not deal with one another on principles of trade. The only natural group in which men are now joined is the family; and the only bond of union resembling that of the family is that which men create for themselves by friendship. . . .

All indications seem to me, therefore, to point to the same conclusion. Men united in those groups out of which modern society has grown do not trade together on what I may call, for shortness, commercial principles. The general proposition which is the basis of political economy made its first approach to truth under the only circumstances which admitted of men meeting at arm's length, not as members of the same group, but as strangers. Gradually the assumption of the right to get the best price has penetrated into the interior of these groups, but it is never completely received so long as the bond of connection between man and man is assumed to be that of family or clan-connection. The rule only triumphs when the primitive community is in ruins. What are the causes which have generalized a rule of the market until it has been supposed to express an original and fundamental tendency of human nature, it is impossible to state fully, so multifarious have they been. Everything which has helped to convert society into a collection of individuals from being an assemblage of families, has helped to add to the truth of the assertion made of human nature by the political economists. One cause may be assigned, after observation of the East, in the substitution of caravan or carrying trade for the fre-quentation of markets. When the first system grows up, the merchant, often to some extent invested with the privileges of an ambassador, carries his goods from the place of production, stores them in local entrepots, and sells them on the principles of the market. ... A man who will pay the price of the day for corn collected from all parts of India, or for cotton-cloth from England, will complain (so I am told) if he is asked an unaccustomed price for a shoe.

If the notion of getting the best price for movable property has only crept to reception by insensible steps, it is all but certain that the idea of taking the highest obtainable rent for land is relatively of very modern origin. The rent of land corresponds to the price of goods, but doubtless was slower in conforming to economical law, since the impression of a brotherhood in the ownership of land still survived when goods had long since become the subject of individual property. So strong is the presumption against the existence of competition-rents in a country peopled by village-communities, that it would require the very clearest evidence to convince me that they were anywhere found under native conditions of society, but the evidence (as I told you) is remarkably unconvincing. . . .

The right to take the highest obtainable rent for land is, as a matter of fact and as a matter of morality, a right derived from a rule of the market. Both the explanation and the justification of the exercise of the right in England and Scotland is that in these countries there really is a market for land. Yet it is notorious that, in England at all events, land is not universally rack-rented. But where is it that the theoretical right is not exercised? It is substantially true that, where the manorial groups substituted for the old village groups survive, there are no rack-rents. What is sometimes called the feudal feeling has much in common with the old feeling of brotherhood which forbade hard bargains, though like much else it has passed from the collective community to the modern representative of its autocratic chieftain. Even in England the archaic rules I have been describing have not yet quite lost their authority. . . .

It is a very remarkable fact that the earliest English emigrants to North America - who, you know, belonged principally to the class of yeomanry - organized themselves at first in village-communities for purposes of cultivation. When a town was organized, the process was that the "General Court granted a tract of land to a company of persons. The land was first held by the company as property in common." (Palfrey, "History of New England," vol. II, p. 13.) An American commentator on this passage adds: "The company of proprietors proceeded to divide the land by assigning first house-lots (in Marlborough from fifteen to twenty acres), then tracts of meadow land, and in some cases mineral land, i.e., where bog-iron ore was found. Pasture and woodland remained in common as the property of the company, but a law of the General Court in 1660 provided that 'hereafter no cottage or dwelling-house be admitted to the privilege of commonage for wood, timber, or herbage but such as are already in being, or shall be erected with the consent of the town.' From that time the commoners appear as a kind of aristocracy, and the commons were gradually divided up." This is not only a tolerably exact account of the ancient European and existing village-community, but it is also a history of its natural development, where the causes which turn it into a manorial group are absent, and of its ultimate dissolution.