parties are the
masters. If they are not completely so, they are not free, and therefore
their contracts are void.

But this freedom has no farther extent, when the contract is made: then
their discretionary powers expire, and a new order of things takes its
origin. Then, and not till then, and on a difference between the
parties, the office of the judge commences. He cannot dictate the
contract. It is his business to see that it be _enforced_,--provided
that it is not contrary to preexisting laws, or obtained by force or
fraud. If he is in any way a maker or regulator of the contract, in so
much he is disqualified from being a judge. But this sort of confused
distribution of administrative and judicial characters (of which we have
already as much as is sufficient, and a little more) is not the only
perplexity of notions and passions which trouble us in the present hour.

What is doing supposes, or pretends, that the farmer and the laborer
have opposite interests,--that the farmer oppresses the laborer,--and
that a gentleman, called a justice of peace, is the protector of the
latter, and a control and restraint on the former; and this is a point
I wish to examine in a manner a good deal different from that in which
gentlemen proceed, who confide more in their abilities than is fit, and
suppose them capable of more than any natural abilities, fed with no
other than the provender furnished by their own private speculations,
can accomplish. Legislative acts attempting to regulate this part of
economy do, at least as much as any other, require the exactest detail
of circumstances, guided by the surest general principles that are
necessary to direct experiment and inquiry, in order again from those
details to elicit principles, firm and luminous general principles, to
direct a practical legislative proceeding.

First, then, I deny that it is in this case, as in any other, of
necessary implication that contracting parties should originally have
had different interests. By accident it may be so, undoubtedly, at the
outset: but then the contract is of the nature of a compromise; and
compromise is founded on circumstances that suppose it the interest of
the parties to be reconciled in some medium. The principle of compromise
adopted, of consequence the interests cease to be different.

But in the case of the farmer and the laborer, their interests are
always the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their free
contracts