FREE LABOUR AND CONTRACT. 509 



815. At the opening of this chapter it was pointed out 

 that free labour and contract are correlatives. Having 

 traced out the various origins of the one we have now to 

 observe the concomitant development of the other. As the 

 first implies the last, it is a necessary result that the last has 

 become general and definite in proportion as the first has 

 become so. 



Contracts were made in the earliest recorded days of 

 partially civilized peoples, as when Abraham bought the cave 

 of Macpelah (using the currency of adjacent cities). On 

 tablets from Assyria &quot; many contracts have been found for 

 the sale or hire of landed property and slaves.&quot; Not dwell 

 ing on earlier cases let us pass on to the case of Kome, where, 

 as Eschenburg says, the members of the trade-gilds, or col 

 legia, &quot; performed work for the state, or for individual citi 

 zens, who were not able to hold slaves.&quot; The last clause of 

 this statement is significant as showing that in the early 

 Roman house-communities, work of different kinds was done 

 within the group (as in the house-communities and village- 

 communities of the Hindus and the Teutons) but that when 

 there came to be a non-slaveholding class, contract became 

 necessary. When a house-community has grown into a vil 

 lage-community, and certain members of the multiplying 

 cluster do special kinds of work for the rest, the giving in re 

 turn so much grain, or the marking off so much ground for 

 cultivation, prefigures contract, but is not contract proper; 

 since the apportionments are arbitrarily fixed by the authori 

 ty of the group. Contract proper arises only when the work 

 and the payment are voluntarily exchanged ; and while, on 

 the one hand, this can happen only when the parties to an 

 agreement are independent, on the other hand when they 

 are independent it must happen. 



This new form of cooperation, seeming to us simple and 

 comprehensible, did not originally seem so. The fact that at 

 first barter was not understood by savages, throws light on 

 the fact that in early European days, commercial transac- 



