Next, take a case where a limit has been set to liability which had previously been unlimited.  In 1851, Congress passed a law, which is still in force, and by which the owners of ships in all the more common cases of maritime loss can surrender the vessel and her freight then pending to the losers; and it is provided that, thereupon, further proceedings against the owners shall cease.  The legislators to whom we owe this act argued that, if a merchant embark a portion of his property upon a hazardous venture, it is reasonable that his stake should be confined to what [7] he puts at risk,—­a principle similar to that on which corporations have been so largely created in America during the last fifty years.

It has been a rule of criminal pleading in England down into the present century, that an indictment for homicide must set forth the value of the instrument causing the death, in order that the king or his grantee might claim forfeiture of the deodand, “as an accursed thing,” in the language of Blackstone.

I might go on multiplying examples; but these are enough to show the remoteness of the points to be brought together.—­ As a first step towards a generalization, it will be necessary to consider what is to be found in ancient and independent systems of law.

There is a well-known passage in Exodus, 1 which we shall have to remember later:  “If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die:  then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit.”  When we turn from the Jews to the Greeks, we find the principle of the passage just quoted erected into a system.  Plutarch, in his Solon, tells us that a dog that had bitten a man was to be delivered up bound to a log four cubits long.  Plato made elaborate provisions in his Laws for many such cases.  If a slave killed a man, he was to be given up to the relatives of the deceased. 2 If he wounded a man, he was to be given up to the injured party to use him as he pleased. 3 So if he did damage to which the injured party did not contribute as a joint cause.  In either case, if the owner [8] failed to surrender the slave, he was bound to make good the loss. 1 If a beast killed a man, it was to be slain and cast beyond the borders.  If an inanimate thing caused death, it was to be cast beyond the borders in like manner, and expiation was to be made. 2 Nor was all this an ideal creation of merely imagined law, for it was said in one of the speeches of Aeschines, that “we banish beyond our borders stocks and stones and steel, voiceless and mindless things, if they chance to kill a man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck the blow afar from its body.”  This is mentioned quite as an every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped upon Demosthenes. 3 As late as the second century after Christ the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum. 4 Plutarch attributes the institution to Draco. 5