ring that time he proposes to
get all the work out of it that he can--to wear it out in fact--feeling
well assured that, when that time expires, either the character of the
service to be performed will have altered or such improvements will have
been introduced into the science of locomotive construction as will make
it cheaper to replace the old engine with one of later build. The
Englishman commonly builds his engines as if they were to last for all
time. There are many engines working on English railways now, the
American contemporaries of which were scrapped twenty years ago. The
Englishman takes pride in their antiquity, as showing the excellence of
the workmanship which was put into them. The American thinks it would
have been incomparably better to have thrown the old things away long
ago and replaced them with others of recent building which would be more
efficient.

The same principle runs through most things in American life, where they
rarely build for posterity, preferring to adapt the article to the work
it has to perform, expecting to supersede it when the time comes with
something better. If a thing suffices, it suffices; whether it be a
locomotive or a contract. "What is the use," the American asks, "when
you can come to an agreement with a fellow in ten minutes and draw up
your contract with him that afternoon,--what is the use of calling in
your solicitors to negotiate and then paying them heavily to keep you
waiting for weeks while they draft documents? We shall have had the
contract running a month and be making money out of it before the
lawyers would get through talking."

Out of this divergence in point of view and practice have of course
grown other differences. One thing is that the American courts have
necessarily come to adopt more liberal views in the interpretation of
contracts than the English; they are to a greater extent inclined to
look more to the intent than to the letter and to attach more weight to
verbal evidence in eliciting what the intent was. No stamping of
documents being necessary in America, the documents calling themselves
contracts, and which are upheld as such, which appear in American courts
are frequently of a remarkable description; but I have a suspicion that
on the whole the American, in this particular, comes as near to getting
justice on the average as does the Englishman.

And the point is that I believe it to be inevitable that the habit of
doing without lawyer