If you look at it from a healthy, open-air point of view, maybe it was better for everybody than sitting in a stuffy court and listening to two bigwigs splitting hairs to the resultant financial ruin of one of their clients. One reason, no doubt, that trials by battle were abolished was that they gave the poor at least as good a chance as the rich. I remember a good story--it is an old one, but still quite good--of a noble lord and landowner who net a collier trespassing in the neighbourhood of Wigan. "My good man," said my lord, "do you know you are trespassing?" "Well, wot of it?" "You have no right to be walking across my land." "I'm like to be walking across somebody's land, I've noan o' me own." "Well, you must not come across mine." "How do I know it is yours, and who gave it you?" "Well, this land," replied the noble lord, "belonged to my father and grandfather and his father for many generations." "But how did thi' first grandfeyther get it?" persisted the collier. "Well, as a matter of fact, it was granted by the King for services rendered. I may say," my lord added proudly, "that my ancestors fought for this land." "Did they, now?" said the collier, "then tak off thi' coat an' I'll feight thee for a bit." One can see from this anecdote that it would never do to return to ordeal by battle. And though individual fighting by violence to assert rights is out of date and not permissible, yet in the affairs of the collection of human beings known as nations the horrible waste of armaments and the menace of war are living evidence of the ultimate tribunal to which we still appeal. No one really believes that force and violence are sane remedies for the evils of the world, and the whole history of mankind shows a gradual decline in the practice and use of them. In each succeeding generation our children will be nearer the truth than we are, and further on the journey towards the end when the rule of Love and Unselfishness will be the only law of the Universe, and will enforce itself without judges, juries, or policemen. And lest anyone should say that all this is the mere vague raving of prophecy, let me set down a short, practical catalogue of what I expect the remedies of to-morrow to bring about in, say, two thousand years. In the first place, the disabilities of the poor that I have written about in these pages will all have been abolished and forgotten. Crime will be regarded as a disease, and it will be as inhuman to treat the criminal with harshness as it is to-day to torture lunatics after the methods of a hundred years ago.