anently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be
entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the
class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the
control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for
so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the
vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado
about nothing.

Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to
be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom
should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and
their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive
prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford
time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and
disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under
modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an
outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either
the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the
point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the
case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for
a time, that unformulated clause in the British constitution which has
hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree
and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so
grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual
pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class
interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment
and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of
ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.

It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable,
line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best
entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic
as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the
hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or
with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively
to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale
and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and
apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on
which interest in the prese