for each generation to cultivate a healthy indifference to the debts incurred on its behalf by its forefathers. But the citizens of each new generation attain citizenship not in large bodies at long intervals, but in small numbers every week. One has only to warn sanguine lenders that veiled repudiations may always be effected in such emergencies by a judicious application of the Income Tax, and to hope that the progress of education under Socialism would tend to produce and preserve on such matters a certain general minimum of common sense. If this minimum is sufficient to control the central government the debts of local bodies can be easily and sternly restricted. Property in services means of course property in future services. The wealth which past services may have produced can be exchanged or owned; but the services themselves cannot. Now all systems of law which we know have allowed private persons to contract with each other for the future performance of certain services, and have punished, or allowed to be punished, the breach of such contracts. Here as in the case of debts, our growing respect for personal liberty has made the law look jealously on all onerous agreements made either by the citizen himself or for him by others. In fact, as Professor Sidgwick points out: “In England hardly any engagement to render personal service gives the promisee a legal claim to more than pecuniary damages--to put it otherwise, almost all such contracts, if unfulfilled, turn into mere debts of money so far as their legal force goes.”[72] The marriage contract forms the principal exception to this rule; but even in this case there seems to be a tendency in most European countries to relax the rigidity of the law. On the other hand the direct claims of the State to the services of its citizens shew at present no signs of diminishing. Compulsory military service and compulsory attendance at school already take up a not inconsiderable share of the life of every male inhabitant of France and Germany. So far in England the compulsion of grown men to serve in any capacity has been condemned for a century past, because it is considered wasteful and oppressive as compared with the free contract system of the open market. Most English Socialists seem inclined to believe that all work for the State should be voluntarily engaged and paid for out of the produce of common industry.