HE following paper is a study of the conditions which afford moral justification for breaking a contract. We shall assume without discussion that in general the formation of a contract creates an obligation to observe its provisions, and shall confine our attention to the exceptions, if such there be, to the rule. incidents which supply us with the material for our analysis have been obtained from the records of the courts. But our purpose is not the formulation of the conditions under which a court is justified in refusing enforcement. We are attempting, rather, to determine when a man is under moral obligation to fulfil a contract and when he may rightfully refuse to do so, apart from the presence or absence of legal compulsion. It is obvious, however, that our conclusions, if valid, have an important bearing upon many of the problems of the law of contracts. A contract may be defined as a reciprocally conditional promise. A promise, in its turn, is a statement to the effect that I am determined to act in such and such a way under given circumstances or at a given time, and that the promisee may rely on my doing so. This statement may be true or false. The state of a man's mind is just as much a fact as the state of his digestion, said Lord Justice Bowen. Accordingly, while the failure to keep a promise may be due to unwillingness to put through an earlier determination, it may also be due to the fact that when I promised I had no intention to perform. In this latter case, I was lying; I was affirming something about my state of mind which I knew to be false. When a man lies, he may lie out of hand. But men often lie by making a statement which is partially or even wholly true in itself, but from which they expect and hope a false inference will