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Rh determinist, but he has such a healthy respect for the “laws” of political economy that he gives them sway over the entire realm of historical contingency. Thus “…Diocletian, one of the wisest of the Emperors, issued an edict fixing prices all over the Empire, and found, as many have found since his day, that not all the laws or penalties in the world can prevent men from buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market.” What is true for the time of Diocletian is also true eleven hundred years later for England after the black Death: “In England Parliament called labourers and artisans to their old rate of wages and forbade them to move from one country to another. Political economy, like nature, may be expelled with a fork, but it always returs. The legislation of the Edwardian parliaments was unavailing to arrest a process grounded in the economic necessities of the time.”

Expressions like “necessary,” “forced upon,” “always,” “must,” and “cannot” are no part of the language of contingency, not to mention those rhetorical flights in which Sulla’s reform of the Roman Senate is pronounced doomed, since “what neither Sulla nor anyone else could do was to fight against the stars in their courses.”

Every contingent fact makes a break in a web of historical relationships that determines how far it shall fall. All that we need to vindicate here is the fact that the web is often broken, and that a great man may be one of the contingent phenomena that break it.

What has been demonstrated for Fisher can be established as easily by examining the pages of any historian who magnifies the facts of contingency at the expense of its limits.

We have previously seen that “if” questions in history are scientifically meaningful. It can also be shown that they point to a fact of tremendous moral and social significance. The necessities of history as of nature, with which it is continuous, are binding without being logically compelling. The necessities of history, where they can be distinguished from those of nature, are in part purposive. They contain an implicit reference to what human beings regard as valuable or preferable.

When we say that the abolition of slavery was historically