I This date is true for England. For America the discipline favorable to the growth of the natural -liberty dogma tasted nearly a century longer. In America the new, modem, technological and business era can scarcely be said to bave set iu in good vigor until the period of the Civil War. Hence, with a longer and later training, the preconoeptioDB of natural liberty are frestier and more tenacious In America. For the Continental peoples the case is different again. With tliem the modem technological and business aituation is of approximately the same date as in America, bnt their trs^ning up to the date of the transition to the modern situation woa In a much lesa degree a tralniDg In individual initiative, free Bcattered induairy, and petty trade. TTie Continental peoples for the most part made a somewhat abrupt transition after the middle of tlie niJietC4>iith century from a stale and dilapidated ayslem ot guild and feudaiistlc prescriptions to the (for them) exotic aystem of modem technology and business principleft
- See CbapUr n. above and Chapter IX. below.
276 THE THBOKT OF BUSIXESS E!(TEKPBI^
** nfttaral ligfaV it is, as within the oognhukee of the law, DOt>«xi^t«nt. It is, perfaafiST "^"^1, with a groM, material actuality ; but it is not real, with a legal, metapbvHically competent reality- Sach coercion as it may exert, or as may be exercised through its mean^ therefore, is, in point of l^al reality, no coercion.
Where pbysical impossibility to fulfil the tenns of a contract arises out of the concatenation of industrial processes, this physical impassibili^ may be pleaded as invalidating the terms of the contract. But the pecuniary pressure of price or subsistence which the sequence and interdependence of industrial processes may bring to bear has no standing as such in law or equity ; it can reach the cognizance of the law only indirectly, through