This Germanic individualism has, it will be seen, been reinforced by almost all the other factors which have shaped our law. We have had more of it than has been good for an age when the interlocking complexities of society demand a greater subordination of individual activity to the good of the community than was thought necessary in a sparse frontier population. Fortunately, one element in the common law, feudalism, contributed precedents for the opposite attitude—the duty of a man to render affirmative acts of service to others, whereas individualism simply requires him to avoid causing them injury. It is indeed remarkable that feudalism, so long relegated to a dusty antiquity, should furnish exactly the remedies needed by the twentieth century. The obligations which were imposed upon men to avoid the disintegration of society in the turbulent violence of the Middle Ages have been revived to preserve intact the noisy, overcrowded, sensitively organized communities of to-day. Thus the recurrence of William Morris to the institutions of the fourteenth century was not altogether the dream of a romantic imagination. In The Dream of John Ball he sees that the law which controlled the forestallers and regraters of those days must cope with the modern monopolist. The principles which enable us to regulate the rates of public service companies, such as railroads, are foreshadowed in the duties of carter and bargeman under the Plantagenets. Indeed, mediaeval law affords a still more sweeping analogy. Edward Adler, of Boston, has proved (28 Harvard Law Review, 135) that the old-time regulation was not limited to a few peculiar trades. It was not alone the common carrier who was obliged to serve all at a reasonable price. Black-letter books and recently unearthed manuscripts tell of the common surgeon, common baker, common builder, and common grist-mill, so that all business was controlled by the community so far as was necessary to maintain the imperilled society of that day.
After a very interesting discussion of Puritanism in our law, the vexed question of the power of judges to declare statutes unconstitutional is raised by the next two factors, the struggle between the courts and the crown in the seventeenth century, and conceptions of the natural rights of man in the eighteenth century. Pound shows that the contemporary controversy is only the latest phase of a recurring conflict between two stubborn theories which have both struck deep roots into English and American minds—the political theory of an absolute sovereign, whether king, legislature, or people,
