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Thus arose the spirit in America, which treated constitutional rights, not so much as special privileges granted by plenary Sovereignty, but as contractual obligations which could be enforced in the Courts against the Sovereign.

The State of Nature had been talked about till it had ceased to be regarded as paradoxical, and hence it seemed easy to give a fallacious reality and definiteness to the contractual origin of Law by insisting on the Social Compact as a historical fact.

It was plain from the record, however, that the contracts complained of in those cases would not have been deemed reasonable at common law. In subsequent cases the court said that the statute should be given a reasonable construction and refused to include within its inhibition, certain contractual restraints of trade which it denominated as incidental or as indirect.

Our own Government has always refused to enforce such contractual obligations on behalf, of its citizens by an appeal to arms. It is much to be wished that all foreign governments would take the same view. But they do not; and in consequence we are liable at any time to be brought face to face with disagreeable alternatives.

What he maintains is that the moral sanction of government is contractual, or, as Jefferson puts it, that government "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed." The doctrine of human equality is in a sense mystical. It is not apparent to the senses, nor can it be logically demonstrated as an inference from anything of which the senses can take cognizance.

The first notions of a Jus Gentium may have been deposited in the minds of the Roman lawyers long before the appointment of a Prætor Peregrinus, but it would only be through extensive and regular trade that they would be familiarised with the contractual system of other Italian communities, and such a trade would scarcely attain considerable proportions before Italy had been thoroughly pacified, and the supremacy of Rome conclusively assured.

6 Again, a person to whom money not owed is paid by mistake is thereby laid under a quasicontractual obligation; an obligation, indeed, which is so far from being contractual, that, logically, it may be said to arise from the extinction rather than from the formation of a contract; for when a man pays over money, intending thereby to discharge a debt, his purpose is clearly to loose a bond by which he is already bound, not to bind himself by a fresh one.

In the case where the treaty grants the so-called right in personam, a merely contractual or promissory right exists, and the exercise of the right would be analogous to the sale of a warship to a belligerent by the neutral granting the permission stipulated in the treaty. Mr.

The resolution adopted, which provided for the collection of contract debts, is as follows: "In order to avoid between nations armed conflicts of a purely pecuniary origin arising from contractual debts claimed of the government of one country by the government of another country to be due to its nationals, the signatory powers agree not to have recourse to armed force for the collection of such contractual debts.

If a republic to the south of us commits a tort against a foreign nation, such as an outrage against a citizen of that nation, then the Monroe Doctrine does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save to see that the punishment does not assume the form of territorial occupation in any shape. The case is more difficult when it refers to a contractual obligation.