n and daring
ambition suggested to him as a means of gain. Although lawyers went on
repeating the old formula, the law began to move in another direction.
The freedom of the owner of property to do upon it whatever he liked,
so he did not overstep his limits or endanger the public health or
safety, began to be restricted. Nay, the law began to make men act
affirmatively upon their property in fashions which it dictated, where
the general health was endangered by non-action. The power to make
contracts began to be limited where industrial conditions made
abstract freedom of contract defeat rather than advance full
individual human life. The power of the owner to dispose freely of his
property began to be limited in order to safeguard the security of the
social institutions of marriage and the family. Freedom of
appropriating _res nullius_ and of using _res communes_ came to be
abridged in order to conserve the natural resources of society.
Freedom of engaging in lawful callings came to be restricted, and an
elaborate process of education and examination to be imposed upon
those who would engage in them, lest there be injury to the public
health, safety or morals. A regime in which anyone might freely set up
a corporation to engage in a public service, or freely compete in such
service, was superseded by one of legal exemption of existing public
utilities from destructive competition. In a crowded world, whose
resources had been exploited, a system of promoting the maximum of
individual self-assertion had come to produce more friction than it
relieved and to further rather than to eliminate waste.

At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, a new
way of thinking grew up. Jurists began to think in terms of human
wants or desires rather than of human wills. They began to think that
what they had to do was not simply to equalize or harmonize wills,
but, if not to equalize, at least to harmonize the satisfaction of
wants. They began to weigh or balance and reconcile claims or wants or
desires, as formerly they had balanced or reconciled wills. They began
to think of the end of law not as a maximum of self-assertion, but as
a maximum satisfaction of wants. Hence for a time they thought of the
problem of ethics, of jurisprudence, and of politics as chiefly one of
valuing; as a problem of finding criteria of the relative value of
interests. In jurisprudence and politics they saw that we must add
practical