n of archaic
institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.

With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the
established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself
working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with
the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain
unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected
to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while
the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing
business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and
competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively
augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not
touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these
matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may
seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple
matter of course to the statesmen.

To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem
to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably
the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and
order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after
all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.
The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have
changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called
for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by
submission, not widely different from what the case of China has
latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace,
which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character,
as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably
low level of hardship and _de facto_ iniquity, and was occupied with
many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but
it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with
the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of
amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an
altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in
effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered
margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history
that very appreciable sec