monly called the specific performance of contracts is the doing of what was agreed to be done, but not at the time when it was agreed to be done; i.e., not till after the time when it was agreed to be done is past, and hence not till the contract is broken. In order to obtain strict performance of a contract, a bill would of course have to be filed before the time for performing the contract arrived; but in fact a bill will not lie (any more than an action at law will lie) upon an affirmative contract until the contract is broken.
What, then, is the reason of this sharp distinction between negative and affirmative duties, namely, that a bill will lie to prevent a breach of the former, while a bill will lie only to enforce a specific reparation of a breach of the latter? First, it is a fundamental principle of procedure that, before any application can be made to a court for relief in respect to a right, the right must be actually violated. This principle is so universal, in all systems of law known to Western civilization, that writers upon jurisprudence assume[1] (if they do not state) that no substantive right, whether absolute or relative, will ever support an action; that every action is founded upon a right resulting from the violation of a substantive right, the law imposing upon every person who violates a substantive right an obligation to indemnify the person injured, and of course vesting in the latter a correlative right to be indemnified for the injury; and hence that the violation of some substantive right is always a sine qua non of the maintenance of an action. It follows, therefore, that all remedies by way of preventing the violation of rights are exceptions to an acknowledged rule; and exceptions to an acknowledged rule must never be so extended as to destroy the rule itself.
Secondly, it has already been seen[2] that the violation of negative duties could not be effectively prevented, unless the court could provisionally restrain their violation during the pendency of suits to prevent their violation; i. e., unless the court could provisionally restrain defendants from doing certain acts before the court knows or can know that the acts are such as ought to be restrained. The same thing is equally true of the violation of affirmative duties (though for somewhat different reasons); for an affirmative duty is violated the moment a certain length of time
