he
institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in
favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their
spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent
reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and
order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least
urgent, nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question
of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of
control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the
public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that
there may be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and
complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which
should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as
the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes
doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its
own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two
antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and
in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of
battle.

Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this
eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the
premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the
installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument
is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally
well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character to
the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad
instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time
and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that
underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the
commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the
direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited
time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the
installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.

That a decision will be sought by recourse to forcible measures, is also
scarcely open to question; since the established law and order provides
for a resort to coercion in the enforcement of these prescriptive
rights, and since both parties in interest, in this as in other cases,
are per