firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the
new conditions contemplated.

The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the
country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of
wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle
class of the well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more
nearly destitute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to
be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the
population must be given an appreciably better education than they have
today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to
arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and
possible disturbance.

* * * * *

Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of
the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly
consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to
follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace
is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an
experiment made _ad hoc_; but with the reservation that the scale of
economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace
was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer
under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light
of this most instructive modern instance, there should appear to be in
prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and
so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more
imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a
more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has
witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and
gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled
opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that
even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall
somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of
gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.

The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a
line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to
place on view,--this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one
would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might