Under this current regime of law and order, according to the equitable principles of Natural Rights, the man without means has no pecuniary rights which his well-to-do pecuniary master is bound to respect. This may have been an unintended, as it doubtless was an unforeseen, outcome of the move out of feudalism and prescriptive rights and immunities, into the system of individual liberty and manhood franchise; but as commonly happens in case of any substantial change in the scheme of institutional arrangements, unforeseen consequences come in along with those that have been intended. In that period of history when Western Europe was gathering that experience out of which the current habitual scheme of law and order has come, the right of property and free contract was a complement and safeguard to that individual initiative and masterless equality of men for which the spokesmen of the new era contended. That it is no longer so at every turn, or even in the main, in later time, is in great part due to changes of the pecuniary order, that have come on since then, and that seem not to have cast their shadow before. In all good faith, and with none but inconsequential reservations, the material fortunes of modern civilised men--together with much else--have so been placed on a pecuniary footing, with little to safeguard them at any point except the inalienable right of pecuniary self-direction and initiative, in an environment where virtually all the indispensable means of pecuniary self-direction and initiative are in the hands of that contracted category of owners spoken of above. A numerical minority--under ten percent of the population--constitutes a conclusive pecuniary majority--over ninety percent of the means--under a system of law and order that turns on the inalienable right of owners to dispose of the means in hand as may suit their convenience and profit,--always barring recourse to illegal force or fraud. There is, however, a very appreciable margin of legal recourse to force and of legally protected fraud available in case of need. Of course the expedients here referred to as legally available force and fraud in the defense of pecuniary rights and the pursuit of pecuniary gain are not force and fraud _de jure_ but only _de facto_. They are further, and well known, illustrations of how the ulterior consequences of given institutional arrangements and given conventionalised principles (habits of thought) of conduct may in time come to run at cross purposes with the initial purpose that led to the acceptance of these institutions and to the confirmation and standardisation of these habitual norms of conduct. For the time being, however, they are "fundamentally and eternally right and good."