ons touching the supernatural verities, so here too the
article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in
mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that
is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more
and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the
difference that while no class--apart from the servants of the
church--have a material interest in the continued integrity of the
articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn
material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the
pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are
also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.

The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding
force, go to uphold the established usage and the established
prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of
property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence
through neglect. It may confidently be counted on that all the apparatus
of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be
brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership,
whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But
then, on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the
prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of
unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to
realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to
his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to
believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic
logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this
matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an
uncompromising kind,--presumably something in the nature of the stand
once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the
irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that
the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground
at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their
authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of
their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James II once were
within their prescriptive right,--which had little to say in the
outcome.

Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of t