322 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. find what he wants in B's hands, but the equivalent which A has to give may be either not to B's liking in kind or not of proper value They must and will make a provisional trade or payment, B taking something of A's that will induce him to sell, but A having the privilege of substituting later an equivalent not now available. So, too, when A has injured B, and B seeks self-redress by his own hands, A may be able to buy off B by handing over whatever he has that is available, but subject to the right of sub- sequent substitution of something more nearly an equivalent. In short, all transactions of the sort must be cash transactions, because there is no credit. We know that the -absence of credit is a feature of the times, both from the ethnological study of primitive surviving communities, and from the fact that credit presupposes a use, legal or moral (customary), of the force of the community, which is wholly inconsistent with the private redress notions of primitive times.^ One must try, moreover, to realize this absence of credit subjectively ; i. e. to remember that the seller or claim-holder is not willing to go away from the spot leaving the matter unsettled, and trusting to (crediting) the other's future action; he is going to get something then and there in satisfaction, and the best allow- ance that the would-be borrower or the tortfeasor can obtain is that the settlement shall be provisional in his favor, i. e. the res given over shall be open to future redemption. The cardinal fea- ture of the transaction is, then, that the party whom we should call the creditor goes away with nothing left to claim, though the (as we call him) debtor has a right of redemption against the other. We shall be better able to appreciate the primitive state of mind if we remember that in at least four important bodies of law and language the primitive word for the ideas of " pledge," ** bet" (or "forfeit"), and "promise," was substantially "the same. In the Scandinavian we have vaed, ved? In the Germanic we have wettiy wette, weddcy vadi-iim^ guadi-iim, and (by sliding the di intoyV) wage, guage, gage? In the Latin we have pignus in the first two 1 Goldschmidt, Handelsrecht, I, 20, 29 : " In its first stages all circulation of goods is done by barter. ... In the Germanic tribes, in North Germany even into the 15th cen- tury, trade on credit is scanty." Compare the following recital of 1 1 50 A. D. : " Vinum mihi vendidit. . . . Non habens igitur admanum pecuniam, censum quendam ... in vadimonio ei deposui" (Kohler, 120). Compare the ways in which both Franken {213) and Heusler (II, 131) posit this. 2 Amira, Nordgermanisches Obligationen-recht, I, §§ 28-31 ; II, § 22. 3 Meibom, Deutsches Pfandrecht, 24; Val de I.ievre, Launegild und Wadia, 97 ff. ; Diez, Worterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen, s. v. Gaggio. Our modern word " for-
