Historical jurists accepted the will theory and have been its leading advocates in modern times. They saw that the whole course of legal history had been one of wider recognition and more effective enforcement of promises. Those who accepted the ethical idealistic interpretation of legal history could see freedom as an ethical idea realizing itself in a larger freedom of self-assertion and self-determination through promises and agreements and a wider giving effect to the will so asserted and determined. For the most part they wrote on the Continent where the field of legally enforceable promises had ceased to be bounded by a narrow fence of Roman historical categories. Thus they had no call to rationalize dogmas of not enforcing promises made as business transactions. Those who accepted the political interpretation saw freedom as a civil or political idea realizing itself in a progress from _status_ to contract in which men's duties and liabilities came more and more to flow from willed action instead of from the accident of social position recognized by law. The English historical jurists might well have asked how far English rules as to consideration were consonant with the implications of such a theory, and whether they must not be expected to give way as the idea unfolded more completely in experience of popular action and judicial decision. But the leader of this school was not a common-law lawyer and the American historical jurists devoted their energies to devising a historical-analytical theory of consideration rather than to the wider question of what promises should be enforced and why.