Fred Carstensen's interesting post on the significance of the Law Merchant for the emergence of capitalism is echoed (but with no fixed date for the birth of constitutional limited government - freedom - and capitalism) in a related discussion by Allyn Young in a 1924 essay on "How the World Goes to Market" (reproduced in Mehrling & Sandilands, eds., _Money and Growth: Selected Papers of Allyn Abbott Young_ Routledge, 1999). I reproduce here a relevant passage (full article available electronically on request): > Political freedom, as we understand it, appeared first in the towns of the later Middle Ages. These towns were communities of traders. There men found a freedom from the restrictions which obtained in the isolated country villages. There they found new and varied opportunities. Trade between the towns became world trade in the modern sense after the discovery of America and of the sea route to India at the end of the fifteenth century. In the advance of civilization into the new worlds thus opened up, the trader, along with the missionary, led the way. > Doubtless economic civilization today remains far short of its goal of equality of opportunity for all. But it is important for us to remember that such a goal could not be conceived of, even as a remote ideal, by the men of antiquity or of the Middle Ages. Freedom of commercial enterprise has brought with it enlarged and enriched notions of the meaning and significance of life. That the world now ranks men according to their own achievements and only in small measure by the status into which they were born is to be attributed in no small measure to the fact that commerce and the system of free enterprise that has grown up along with and as a part of commerce gives little weight to anything but achievement and success. > An illustration of the significance of the relation of the growth of commerce to the growth of freedom is found in the history of the Law Merchant. This was in the beginning merely a body of rules laid down by medieval merchants for regulating their relations one with another. The old rules of medieval law hampered them. Moreover, their trade created new situations and problems to which the old rules did not apply. The Law Merchant was different in spirit from the then prevailing systems of law. It made little of distinctions of outward form, of the status of the parties to a litigation, of title or sex, in order that it might deal with rights and duties on a broadly human basis. It had to do very largely with contract, that is, with free agreement. It has long been absorbed into the general body of our law, where it has had a most wholesome influence and effect. Roger Sandilands