That authentication of ownership out of which the sacred rights of property have apparently grown may well have arisen as a sort of mutual insurance among owners as against the disaffection of the dispossessed; which would presently give rise to a sentiment of solidarity within the class of owners, would acquire prescriptive force through habitual enforcement, become a matter of customary right to be consistently respected under the institutional forms of property, and eventuate in that highly moralised expression of self-aggrandisement which it is today. But with the putting-away of fancy-free predation, as being a conventionally disallowed means of self-aggrandisement, sentiments of equity and solidarity would presently come in--perhaps at the outset by way of disingenuous make-believe--and so the way would be made easier under the shelter of this range of conceptions for a rehabilitation of the primordial parental instinct and its penchant for the common good. And when ownership has once been institutionalised in this impersonal and quasi-dispassionate form it will lend but a decreasingly urgent bias to the cultural scheme in the direction of differential respect of persons and a differential rating of natural phenomena in respect of the occult potencies and efficacies imputed to them. As the institutional ground has shifted from free-swung predation to a progressively more covert régime of self-aggrandisement and differential gain, the instinct of workmanship has progressively found freer range and readier access to its raw material. The differential good repute of wealth and rank has of course continued to be of much the same nature in the later (commercial) stages of the pecuniary culture as in the earlier (predatory) stages. An aristocratic (or servile) scheme of life must necessarily run in invidious terms, since that is the whole meaning of the phenomenon; and resting as any such scheme does on pecuniary distinctions, whether direct or through the intermediary term of predatory exploit, it will necessarily involve the corollary that wealth and exemption from work (_otium cum dignitate_) is honourable and that poverty and work is dishonourable. But with the progressive commercialisation of gain and ownership it also comes to pass that peaceable application to the business in hand may have much to do with the acquirement of a reputable standing; and so long as work is of a visibly pecuniary kind and is sagaciously and visibly directed to the acquisition of wealth, the disrepute intrinsically attaching to it is greatly offset by its meritorious purpose. So much so, indeed, that there has even grown up something of a class feeling, among the class who have come by their wealth through industry and shrewd dealing, to the effect that peaceable diligence and thrift are meritorious traits.