Nevertheless, it is inevitable that, during a period more or less extended, material progress will be accompanied by numerous legal enactments such as a perfect state would dispense with, and possibly the end of all of them will not have been reached even in a century's time. How invention tends to promote legislation has recently been noticeable in the new laws affecting automobile traffic on roads. In a perfect state it would doubtless be unnecessary to provide legal machinery to compel the owners of powerful and rapid vehicles to respect the rights of their fellow-citizens and to abstain from running away without identifying themselves when they had caused an accident. In proportion as the moral condition of the next century approximates to perfection, such ordinances as the motor-car laws will be unnecessary. But for a long time new laws will always be coming into necessity as a result of new inventions. For instance, when, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, business is carried on largely through the medium of recording telephones, wirelessly actuated, special laws will have to be devised to protect trade against the various kinds of fraud which this method of transaction would otherwise facilitate, and some methods will have to be devised for giving legal force to arrangements made by telephony, akin to the methods which now give legal force to written contracts. Similarly, various by-laws will have to be enacted to protect the public against the accidents incidental to the various methods of rapid transit that will have come into use. Probably it will no longer be necessary, and it will have been perceived to be injurious, to protect travellers against their own rashness.