The only principle {attested habit of thought) which may contest its primacy in civil matters is a vague " general welfare " clause ; and even this can effectively contest its claims only under exceptional circumstances. Under the application of any general welfare clause the presmnption is and always must be that the principle of free contract be left intact so far as the circumstances of the case permit. The citizen may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and the due process proceeds on the premise that property rights are inviolable. In its bearing upon the economic relations between individuals this comes to mean, in effect, not only that one individual or group of individuals may not legally bring any other than pecuniary pressure to bear upon another individual or group, but also that pecuniary pressure canuot be barred.
Now, through gradual change of the economic situation, this conventional principle of unmitigated and inalienable freedom of contract began to grow obsolete from about the time when it was fairly installed ; obsolescent, of course, not in point
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of law, but in point of fact. Since about the time when this new conventional standardization of the scheme of economic life in terms of free contract reached its mature development, in the eighteenth century,' a new standardizing force, that of the machine process, has invaded the field.* The standardization and the constraint of the system of machine industry differs from what went before it in that it has had no conventional recognition, i no metaphysical authentication. It has not become | a legal fact. Therefore it neither need nor can be I taken account of by the legal mind. It is a new fact which fits into the framework neither of the ancient system of prescriptive usage nor of the later system of free personal initiative. It does not exist dejure, but only de facto. Belonging neither to the defunct system nor to the current legal system, since it neither constitutes nor traverses a