f discrepancies.

It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more
particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in
the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also,
e.g., be no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and if
national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the
discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those
who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast
the form which this issue is to take, or the manner, incidents,
adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more
ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an
issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount
national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national
interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the
first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the
character of the international engagements entered into in the formation
of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the
transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an
international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful
interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to
bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the
peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.

* * * * *

In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this
modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of
law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled
usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of
ownership,--which may or may not have been a salutary institutional
arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western
Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on,
standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation
by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among
those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of
free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So
it has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an
inviolable natural right. It has