the curtailment or abrogation of
these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested
rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in
great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.
Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective
revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which
these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability,
suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of
curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous
movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much
conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute
for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be
done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way
out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and
disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without
unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to
replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain
by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of
drollery.

Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of
private ownership is the familiar and accepted method of conducting
industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in
the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency
of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should
accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away
international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in
a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of
exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.
And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division
of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old
familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put
down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic,
or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received
law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.

* * * * *

In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the
nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook