There is one further point to be made about awards of expectation damages. An award of such damages in either of the two situations envisaged above was, in a sense, a reward for diligence, skill, and foresight. The man who managed to buy at less than market price, the man who had the foresight to buy in advance of changes in market price, was a man who outsmarted his contracting partner. It was precisely this sort of diligence, skill, and foresight which, it was coming to be felt, ought to be rewarded and encouraged. In the next century, this indeed became the dominant philosophy of the age. But in the eighteenth century (as, perhaps, today) there were many who viewed these qualities with some distaste rather than with admiration. To make a contract to buy at less than the market price was to outwit your contracting partner, perhaps to take advantage of his ignorance or foolishness or necessitous circumstances. Was this to be encouraged? Or again, to make a contract for future performance, and then to insist on performance at the contract price when the market had changed, was hardly gentlemanly; it might indeed, be a pure form of gambling, in which case it was socially acceptable but not exactly morally justifiable; alternatively it might be to take advantage of a pure windfall which was morally unfair; or it might be to take advantage of superior foresight in anticipating change. That, as before, was a quality viewed with less than whole-hearted admiration by men in eighteenth-century England. The modern reader, who is likely on most of these matters to share the sympathies of the eighteenth-century Englishman, rather than his nineteenth-century successor, should have little difficulty in understanding why expectation damages were not widely awarded in the eighteenth century.
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