was resisted in early times, the precedent was not followed, it fell into complete desuetude, and it remained for the case of Springhead Spinning Company v.  Riley,[1] decided as late as 1868, to extend the injunction process to the prohibition of a strike.  And in more recent labor cases it has been found that the line between prohibiting a man from leaving his employment, even under peculiar circumstances, and ordering him to proceed with his contract of employment and to carry it out, is extremely fine, if not indistinguishable.[2]

[Footnote 1:  L.R. 6 Eq. 551.]

[Footnote 2:  For instance, the injunction against the employees of the Southern California Railroad requiring defendants to perform all their regular and accustomed duties “so long as they remain in the employment of the company” (62 Fed. 796), has always been severely criticised.]

Now, the reason of this great principle (peculiar, I think, to Anglo-Saxon law) lies at its very root.  It is the principle of personal liberty again.  To English notions, and to English courts, indefinite labor continued for an indefinite time, or applied to an indefinite number of services, is indistinguishable from slavery; and compulsory labor even under a definite labor contract, such as to work for a week or a month or a year, or in limited directions, as, for instance, to work at making shoes or weaving cloth, when enforced by the strong arm of the law, smacked too much of slavery to be tolerable by our ancestors.  Thus it is that, alone of all contracts, if a man sign an agreement to work for us to-day, he may break it to-morrow and will not be compelled to perform it; our only redress is to sue him for damages, and this again because we can only act under the common law.  Chancery at this point at least is forbidden to take cognizance of matters affecting personal liberty and labor; and the common law, as has been said, “sounds only in damages.”  It is only chancery that can compel a man to do or not to do some thing or to carry out a contract.

The other basic principle affecting all questions of labor law is that of freedom of trade or labor, correlative to the principle of freedom of contract as to property right, and, indeed, embodying that notion also.  That is to say (perhaps I should say, to repeat) that an Englishman, an American, has a right to labor where and for whom and at what he will, and freely to make contract for such labor, and freely to exercise all trades, and not to be combined against by others, or competed with by a monopoly favored by the state.  These last two clauses, of course, belong to our next chapter.  This right of contract is not peculiar to the English law, as is the right not to be compelled to personal service, and is much better understood; though it is still earnestly argued by many advocates of union labor that there is no real freedom of contract, or, at least, equality of contract, between the employer and the employee; that