Legislation and legal decisions are based on the dogma of Natural Liberty. This is peculiarly true as regards the Euglish-speaking peoples, the foundation of whose jurisprudence is the common law, and it holds tnie in an especial degree of America. In other European communities the sway of naturalrights preconceptions is not so unmitigated, but even with them there is a visibly growing predilection for the natural-rights standpoint In all matters touching business relations. The dogma of natural liberty is peculiarly conducive to an exjreditious business traffic and peculiarly consonant with the habits of thought which necessarily prevail in any business community.
The current body of natural-rights preconeep-
lions antedates the modem busineas gitnaticoi. Tbe ■cheme of natural rights grew up and found secure lodgement in the common sense of the community, as well as with its lawgivers and coorts, under the discipline of the small industry and petty trade (" domestic industry ") whose development culminated in tbe eighteenth century.' In industrial matters the efficient and autonomous factor in the days of the small industry was tbe individual workman, his personal force, dexterity, and diligence; similarly in the petty trade of the precapitalistic English situation the decisive factor was the discretion and sagacity of the small merchant and the petty employer, who stood in direct personal relations with their customers and their employees. In BO far as trade and industry was not restrained by conventional regulations, statutory or customary, both trade and industry was in effect an open field of free competition, in which man met man on a somewhat equable footing. While the competitors were not on a footing of material equality, the industrial system was sufficiently loose-jointed, of a sufficiently diffuse growth, to