cepted method of conducting industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit. And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic, or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.
In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation, certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security. National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.
There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently, in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in the first instance.
Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of human culture, how the common man is to fare under this régime of law and order,—the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation 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 sections of the populace were approaching an attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds, that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the projected pax orbis terrarum all fear of invasion, it is hopefully believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of the underbred.
If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a significant indication of what may be looked for under a régime of peace at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circumstances conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will necessarily differ from the corresponding
circumstances that conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding of events.