the history of the whole modern doctrine of master and servant,
and principal and agent. All servants are now as free and as
liable to a suit as their masters. Yet the principle introduced
on special grounds in a special case, when servants were slaves,
is now the general law of this country and England, and under it
men daily have to pay large sums for other people's acts, in
which they had no part and [17] for which they are in no sense to
blame. And to this day the reason offered by the Roman jurists
for an exceptional rule is made to justify this universal and
unlimited responsibility. /1/

So much for one of the parents of our common law. Now let us turn
for a moment to the Teutonic side. The Salic Law embodies usages
which in all probability are of too early a date to have been
influenced either by Rome or the Old Testament. The thirty-sixth
chapter of the ancient text provides that, if a man is killed by
a domestic animal, the owner of the animal shall pay half the
composition (which he would have had to pay to buy off the blood
feud had he killed the man himself), and for the other half give
up the beast to the complainant. /2/ So, by chapter thirty-five,
if a slave killed a freeman, he was to be surrendered for one
half of the composition to the relatives of the slain man, and
the master was to pay the other half. But according to the gloss,
if the slave or his master had been maltreated by the slain man
or his relatives, the master had only to surrender the slave. /3/
It is interesting to notice that those Northern sources which
Wilda takes to represent a more primitive stage of German law
confine liability for animals to surrender alone. /4/ There is
also a trace of the master's having been able to free himself in
some cases, at a later date, by showing that the slave was no