Excerpt from Cases on the Law of Torts, Vol. 1 of 2: Selected and Annotated It is concerned with the most vital, the most important, and at the same time the most fluid and unsettled problems of human life. Not only does every new development of commerce, of manufacture, every new invention, every new habit and method of living, raise new questions, but the answer given is and must be itself varying and changing with every settled change of public Opinion. No final answer can ever be found satisfactory for all time or in every place. It is not a matter which can be settled by hard and fast unchanging rules of law. The problem is essentially sociological, economic and political. It is here that the study of law touches and blends with a knowledge of development of other lines of human thought and affairs. At most the law can only aim to express the consensus of public opinion, and this opinion must vary with changed external conditions and even more with that mental change which accompanies the acquisition of political power, and so of social importance, by large classes of mankind, whose needs and desires have heretofore gone unexpressed or, if expressed, unregarded. The subject is so absorbingly interesting that the necessity of brevity seems here a very real misfortune. Yet it is so vast that any effort to cover it fully would spread the collection to an alto gether unteachable bulk. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.