Law did not concern itself at first with agreements or breaches of agreements. Its function was to keep the peace by regulating or preventing private war and this only required it to deal with personal violence and with disputes over the possession of property. I may remind you of the proposition of Hippodamus in the fifth century B. C. that there were but three subjects of lawsuits, namely, insult, injury and homicide. If a dispute over breach of an agreement led to an assault and a breach of the peace, tribunals might be called on to act. But it was the assault not the breach of agreement with which they were concerned. Controversy as to possession of property was a fertile source of disturbance of the peace and tribunals would entertain an action to recover possession. Agreements to compound for a wrong are perhaps the earliest type. But the law had its eye upon the need of composition, not upon the agreement. No basis for a law of contracts was to be found in the power of the tribunals with respect to injuries although our law did make assumpsit out of trespass on the case. On the other hand recovery of property could be used for this purpose. Hence the first legal, as distinguished from religious, contract was worked out on the analogy of a real transaction. Before this, however, another possibility had developed in the religiously sanctioned promise. Religion, the internal discipline of the organized kindred, and the law of the state were three co-ordinate agencies of social control in ancient society. Nor was law for a long time the chief of these nor the one which covered the widest field. If the gods had been called to witness or good faith had a religious sanction, the duty to keep a promise was a matter for religion. Otherwise the mere pact or agreement not within the cognizance of the priests was but a matter for self-help. Hindu law shows the idea of religious duty to keep faith in full vigor. In the Hindu system the relation between the parties to a debt is not legal but religious and now that a law has grown up under English influence it is said that there is a legal obligation because there is a religious obligation. A man is bound in law because and to the extent that he is bound in religion and not otherwise and no more. To the Hindu lawyer a debt is not an obligation merely. It is a sin the consequences whereof follow the debtor into another world. Vrihaspati says: "He who, having received a sum lent or the like does not return it to the owner, will be born hereafter in his creditor's house a slave, a servant, a woman or a quadruped." Narada says that when one dies without having paid his debt, "the whole merit of his devotions or of his perpetual fire belongs to his creditors." In short the debtor is looked on as one who wrongfully withholds from the creditor the latter's property and hence as in some sort a thief. The legal idea, so far as there is one, is not one of obligation but of a property right in the creditor.