work. American civil rights have taken an extreme form, with relatively great stress on the inviolability of pecuniary relations, due to the peculiar circumstances under which the American community has grown up. The pioneers, especially in that North-Atlantic seaboard community that has been chiefly effective in shaping American traditions, brought with them a somewhat high-wrought variant of the English preconception in favor of individual discretion, and this tradition they put in practice under circumstances peculiarly favorable to a bold development. They brought little of the remnants of that prescriptive code that once bound the handicraft system, and the conditions of life in the colonies did not foster a new growth of conventional regulations circumscribing private initiative. America is the native habitat of the self-made man, id the self-made man is a pecuniary organism.* ' ' Presently, when occasion arose, the metaphysics of natural liberty, pecuniary and other, was embodied in set form in constitutional enactments. It is therefore involved in a more authentic form and with more incisive force in the legal structure of this community than in that of any other.
' Ct., e-g., Ashley, " The Economic Atmoapben SUTVtgt, Historic atid Economic^ pp. 405 et teq.
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Freedom of contract is the fundamental tenet of the legal creed, so to speak, inviolable and inalienable ; and within the province of law and equity no one has competence to penetrate behind this first premise or to question the merits of the naturalrights metaphysics on which it rests.