THE LAWS OF LONDON
"Del un Marchant au jour present
L'en parle molt communement,
Il ad noun Triche plein de guile,
Qe pour sercher del orient
Jusques au fin del occident,
N'y ad cite ne bonne vile
U Triche son avoir ne pile.
Triche en Bourdeaux, Triche en Civile,
Triche en Paris achat et vent;
Triche ad ses niefs et sa famile,
Et du richesce plus nobile
Triche ad disz foitz plus q'autre gent.
Triche a Florence et a Venise
Ad son recet et sa franchise,
Si ad a Brugges et a Gant;
A son agard auci s'est mise
La noble Cite sur Tamise,
La quelle Brutus fuist fondant;
Mais Triche la vait confondant."
GOWER, "Mirour," 25273 ff.
But the picturesque side of things was only the smaller half of Chaucer's
life, as it is of ours. We must not be more royalist than the King, or
claim more for Chaucer and his England than he himself would ever have
dreamed of claiming. That which seems most beautiful and romantic to us
was not necessarily so five hundred years ago. The literature of Chivalry,
for instance, seems to have touched Chaucer comparatively little: he
scarcely mentions it but in more or less open derision. Again, while
Ruskin and William Morris seem at times almost tempted to wish themselves
back to the 14th century for the sake of its Gothic architecture, Chaucer
in his retrospective mood is not ashamed to yearn for a Golden Age as yet
uncorrupted by architects of any description whatever--
No trumpes for the warres folk ne knew,
Nor towers high and walles round or square ...
Yet were no palace chambers, nor no halls;
In caves and in woodes soft and sweet
Slepten this blessed folk withouten walls.[131]
No doubt he would as little have chosen seriously to go back to hips and
haws as Morris would seriously have wished to live in the Middle Ages. But
his words may warn us against over-estimating the picturesque side of his
age. The most important is commonly what goes on under the surface; and
this was eminently true of Chaucer's native London. When we look closely
into the social and political ideals of those motley figures which
thronged the streets, we may see there our own modern liberties in the
making, and note once more how slowly, yet how surely, the mills of God
grind. It was once as hard for a community of a few thousand souls to
govern itself as it is now for a nation; and parts of what seem to us the
very foundations of civilized society were formerly as uncertain and
tentative as Imperial Federation or the International Peace Congress.
The ordinary English town after the Conquest was originally simply part of
a feudal estate: a rather denser aggregation than the ordinary village,
and therefore rather more conscious of solidarity and power. The
householders, by dint of holding more and more together, became
increasingly capable of driving collective bargains, and of concentrating
their numerical force upon any point at issue. They thus throve better
than the isolated peasant; and their growing prosperity made them able to
pay heavier dues to their feudal lords, who thus saw a prospect of
immediate pecuniary gain in selling fresh liberties to the citizens. This
process, which was still in its earlier stages in many towns during
Chaucer's lifetime, was, however, already far advanced in London, which
claimed over other cities a superiority symbolized by the legend of its
origin: Brut, the son of AEneas, had founded it, and named it Troynovant,
or New Troy. But the city had far more tangible claims to supremacy than
this: it had obtained from Henry I.--earlier by nearly a century than any
other--the right of electing its own sheriff and justiciar; and from a
still earlier time than this it had been almost as important politically
as it is now. Mr. Loftie, whose "London" in the "Historic Towns" series
gives so clear a view of its political development, shows us the city
holding out against Canute long after the rest of the kingdom had been
conquered; and making, even after Hastings, such terms with the Conqueror
as secured to the citizens their traditional liberties. Even thus early,
the city fully exemplified the dignity and enduring power of commerce and
industry in an age of undisguised physical force. Its foreign trade was
considerable, and foreign settlers numerous. "Already there was trade with
the Rhine and the Zuyder Zee; and Norman ships, so far back as the days of
AEthelred and even of his father, had brought the wines of the south to
London. The [German] emperor's men had already established their
stafelhof, or steelyard, and traded under jealous rules and almost
monastic discipline, but with such money that to this day 'sterling'
stands beside 'real' as an adjective, for the Royal credit was not better
than that of the Easterling. Some Germans and Danes who did not belong to
the 'Gildhalda Theutonicorum,' as it was called in the 13th century,
settled in the city beside the Normans of the Conquest, the Frenchmen
mentioned in the charter, and the old English stock of law-worthy
citizens."[132]
The example of generosity set by William was followed more or less closely
by all his successors except Matilda, who offended the citizens by
suppressing their chief liberties, and owed her final failure mainly to
the steady support which they therefore gave to Stephen. The prosperity
of London reacted on many other cities, which were gradually enabled to
buy themselves charters after her model. Writing before 1200 A.D.,
Fitzstephen boasted that London traded "with every nation under heaven";
and Matthew of Westminster, a generation later, gives an even more glowing
picture of English commerce; "Could the ships of Tharshish" (he exclaims),
"so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?" Our fortunate
insularity, the happy balance of power between King and barons, and
sometimes the wisdom of particular sovereigns, had in fact enabled
commerce to thrive so steadily that it was rapidly becoming a great
political power. Michelet has painted with some characteristic
exaggeration of colour, but most truly in the main, the contrast between
English and French commerce in the half-century preceding Chaucer's birth.
French sovereigns failed to establish any uniform system of weights and
measures, and were themselves responsible for constant tampering with the
coinage; they discouraged the Lombards, interfered with the great fairs,
placed heavy duties on all goods to be bought or sold, and at one time
even formally forbade "all trade with Flanders, Genoa, Italy, and
Provence." All roads and waterways were subject to heavy tolls; "robbed
like a merchant" became a proverbial saying. Meanwhile, our own Edward I.,
though he banished the Jews and allowed his commercial policy to fluctuate
sadly, if judged by a purely modern standard, yet did much to encourage
foreign trade. Edward III. did so consistently; he may, as Hallam says,
almost be called the Father of English Commerce; we have seen how he sent
Chaucer's father to negotiate with the merchants of Cologne, and our poet
himself with those of Genoa. When, in 1364, Charles the Wise proclaimed
freedom of trade for all English merchants in France, this was only one of
the many points on which he paid to English methods the compliment of
close imitation. But, though foreigners were welcome to the English
Government, it was not always so with the English people. Chaucer's
grandfather, in 1310, was one of sixteen citizens whose arrest the King
commanded on account of "certain outrages and despites" done to the Gascon
merchants. The citizens of London specially resented the policy by which
Edward III. took foreign traders under his special protection, and
absolved them from their share of the city taxes in consideration of the
tribute which they paid directly to him.[133] The Flemings, as we have
seen, were massacred wholesale in the rising of 1381; and the Hanse
merchants were saved from the same fate only by the strong stone walls of
their steelyard. But the most consistently unpopular of these strangers,
and the most prosperous, were the Lombards, a designation which included
most Italian merchants trading abroad. These, since the expulsion of the
Jews, had enjoyed almost a monopoly of usury--a hateful term, which, in
the Middle Ages, covered not only legitimate banking, but many other
financial operations innocent in themselves and really beneficial to the
community.[134] Usury, though very familiar to the papal court, was
fiercely condemned by the Canon Law, which would have rendered impossible
all commerce on a large scale, but for the ingrained inconsistency of
human nature. "He who taketh usury goeth to hell, and he who taketh none,
liveth on the verge of beggary"; so wrote an Italian contemporary of
Chaucer's. But there was always here and there a bolder sinner who frankly
accepted his chance of damnation, and who would point to his big belly and
fat cheeks with a scoffing "See how the priest's curses shrivel me up!"
Preachers might indeed urge that, if the eyes of such an one had been
opened, he would have seen how "God had in fact fattened him for
everlasting death, like a pig fed up for slaughter"; but there remained
many possibilities of evasion. For one open rebel, there were hundreds who
quietly compounded with the clergy for their ill-gotten gains. "Usurers'
bodies were once buried in the field or in a garden; now they are interred
in front of the High Altar in churches"; so writes a great Franciscan
preacher. But the friars themselves soon became the worst offenders. Lady
Meed in "Piers Plowman"--the incarnation of Illicit Gain--has scarcely
come up to London when--
"Then came there a confessor, coped as a Friar ...
Then he absolved her soon, and sithen he said
'We have a window a-working, will cost us full high;
Wouldst thou glaze that gable, and grave therein thy name,
Sure should thy soul be heaven to have.'"[135]
In other words, the Canon Law practically compelled the taker of interest
to become a villain, as the old penal laws encouraged the thief to commit
murder. Gower, if we make a little obvious allowance for a satirist's
rhetoric, will show us how ordinary citizens regarded the usurious
Lombards.[136] "They claim to dwell in our land as freely, and with as
warm a welcome, as if they had been born and bred amongst us.... But they
meditate in their heart how to rob our silver and gold." They change (he
says) their chaff for our corn; they sweep in our good sterling coin so
that there is little left in the country. "To-day I see such Lombards come
[to London] as menials in mean attire; and before a year is past, by dint
of deceit and intrigue, they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our
city.... It is great shame that our Lords, who ought to keep our laws,
should treat our merchants as serfs, and quietly free the hands of strange
folk to rob us. But Covetise hath dominion over all things: for bribery
makes friends and brings success: that is the custom in my country." Nor
"in my country" only, but in other lands too; for the best-known firm of
merchants now-a-days is Trick and Co. "Seek from East to the going out of
the West, there is no city or good town where Trick does not rob to enrich
himself. Trick at Bordeaux, Trick at Seville, Trick at Paris buys and
sells; Trick has his ships and servants, and of the noblest riches Trick
has ten times more than other folk. At Florence and Venice, Trick has his
fortress and freedom of trade; so he has at Bruges and Ghent; under his
care too has the noble City on the Thames put herself, which Brutus
founded, but which Trick is on the way to confound...." Why not, indeed,
in an age in which all the bonds of society are loosed? "One [merchant]
told me the other day how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly
who, being able to get the delights of this life, should pass them by: for
after this life is over, no man knoweth for truth which way or by what
path we go. Thus do the merchants of our present days dispute and say and
answer for the most part."
Much of Gower's complaint about Trick might be equally truly applied to
any age or community; but much was due also to the growth of large and
complicated money transactions, involving considerable speculation on
credit. Gower complains that merchants talked of "many thousands" where
their fathers had talked of "scores" or "hundreds"; and he, like Chaucer,
describes the dignified trader as affecting considerable outward show to
disguise the insecurity of his financial position.[137] Edward III. set
here a Royal example by failing for a million florins, or more than
L4,000,000 of modern money, and thus ruining two of the greatest European
banking firms, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence. Undeterred by similar
risks, the de la Poles of Hull undertook to finance the King, and became
the first family of great merchant-princes in England. Operations such as
these opened a new world of possibilities for commerce--vast stakes on the
table, and vast prizes to the winners. Moreover, city politics grew
complicated in proportion with city finance. The mass of existing
documents shows a continual extension of the Londoner's civic authorities,
until the townsfolk were trammeled by a network of byelaws not indeed so
elaborate as those of a modern city, but incomparably more hampering and
vexatious. On this subject, which is of capital importance for the
comprehension of life in Chaucer's time, it would be difficult on the
whole to put the facts more clearly than they have already been put by
Riley on pp. cix. ff. of his introduction to the "Liber Albus." "Such is a
sketch of some few of the leading features of social life within the walls
of London in the 13th and 14th centuries. The good old times, whenever
else they may have existed, assuredly are not to be looked for in days
like these. And yet these were not lawless days; on the contrary, owing in
part to the restless spirit of interference which seems to have actuated
the lawmakers, and partly to the low and disparaging estimate evidently
set by them upon the minds and dispositions of their fellow-men, these
were times, the great evil of which was a superfluity of laws both
national and local, worse than needless; laws which, while unfortunately
they created or protected comparatively few real valuable rights, gave
birth to many and grievous wrongs. That the favoured and so-called _free_
citizen of London even--despite the extensive privileges in reference to
trade which he enjoyed--was in possession of more than the faintest shadow
of liberty, can hardly be alleged, if we only call to mind the substance
of the pages just submitted to the reader's notice, filled as they are
with enactments and ordinances, arbitrary, illiberal, and oppressive:
laws, for example, which compelled each citizen,[138] whether he would or
no, to be bail and surety for a neighbour's good behaviour, over whom
perhaps it was impossible for him to exercise the slightest control; laws
which forbade him to make his market for the day until the purveyors for
the King and the great lords of the land had stripped the stalls of all
that was choicest and best; laws which forbade him to pass the city walls
for the purpose even of meeting his own purchased goods; laws which bound
him to deal with certain persons or communities only, or within the
precincts only of certain localities; laws which dictated, under severe
penalties, what sums, and no more, he was to pay to his servants and
artisans; laws which drove his dog out of the streets, while they
permitted 'genteel dogs' to roam at large: nay, even more than this, laws
which subjected him to domiciliary visits from the city officials on
various pleas and pretexts; which compelled him to carry on a trade under
heavy penalties, irrespective of the question whether or not it was at his
loss; and which occasionally went so far as to lay down rules, at what
hours he was to walk in the streets, and incidentally, what he was to eat
and what to drink. Viewed individually, laws and ordinances such as these
may seem, perhaps, of but trifling moment; but 'trifles make life,' the
poet says, and to have lived fettered by numbers of restrictions like
these, must have rendered life irksome in the extreme to a sensitive man,
and a burden hard to be borne. Every dark picture, however, has its
reverse, and in the legislation even of these gloomy days there are one or
two meritorious features to be traced. The labourer, no doubt, so far as
disposing of his labour at his own time and option was concerned, was too
often treated little better than a slave; but, on the other hand, the
price of bread taken into consideration, the wages of his labour
appear--at times, at least--to have been regulated on a very fair and
liberal scale. The determination, too, steadily evinced by the civic
authorities, that every trader should really sell what he professed to
sell, and that the poor, whatever their other grievances, should be
protected, in their dealings, against the artifices of adulteration,
deficient measures, and short weight, is another feature that commands our
approval. Greatly deserving, too, of commendation is the pride that was
evidently felt by the Londoners of these times in the purity of the waters
of their much-loved Thames, and the carefulness with which the civic
authorities, in conjunction with the Court, took every possible precaution
to preserve its banks from encroachment and its stream from pollution. The
fondness, too, of the citizens of London in former times for conduits and
public fountains, though based, perhaps, upon absolute necessity, to some
extent, is a feature that we miss in their representatives at the present
day."
The words about the purity of the Thames need some modification in the
light of such incidents as those recorded (for instance) in Mr. Sharpe's
calendar of "Letter Book" G, pp. xxvii. ff.;[139] but the most serious
gap in Riley's picture is the absence of any clear allusion to the almost
incredible gulfs which are frequently to be found between 14th-century
theory and practice. We have already seen how openly the city officials
broke their own brand-new resolution about lodgings over the city gates;
and the surviving records of all medieval cities tell the same tale, for
which we might indeed be prepared by the wearisome iteration with which we
find the same enactments re-enacted again and again, as if they had never
been thought of before. As Dean Colet said, when the world of the Middle
Ages was at its last gasp, it was not new laws that England needed, but a
new spirit of justice in enforcing the old laws. Seldom, indeed, had these
become an absolute dead letter--we find them invoked at times where we
should least have expected it--but at the very best they were enforced
with a barefaced partiality which cannot be paralleled in modern civilized
countries even under the most unfavourable circumstances. From Norwich,
one of the greatest towns in the kingdom, and certainly not one of the
worst governed, we have fortunately surviving a series of Leet Court
Rolls, which have been admirably edited by Mr. Hudson for the Selden
Society, and commented on more briefly in his "Records of the City of
Norwich."[140] He shows that, whereas the breach of certain civic
regulations should nominally have been punished by a fine for the first
offence, pillory for the second, and expulsion for the third, yet in fact
there was no pretence, in an ordinary way, of taking the law literally.
"The price of ale was fixed according to the price of wheat. Almost every
housewife of the leading families brewed ale and sold it to her
neighbours, and invariably charged more than the fixed price. The
authorities evidently expected and wished this course to be taken, for
these ladies were regularly presented and amerced every year for the same
offence, paid their amercements and went away to go through the same
process in the future as in the past. Much the same course was pursued by
other trades and occupations. Fishmongers, tanners, poulterers, cooks,
etc., are fined wholesale year after year for breaking every by-law that
concerned their business. In short, instead of a trader (as now) taking
out a license to do his business on certain conditions which he is
expected to keep, he was bound by conditions which he was expected to
break and afterwards fined for the breach. The same financial result was
attained or aimed at by a different method." Moreover, the fines
themselves were collected with the strangest irregularity. "Some are
excused by the Bailiffs without reason assigned; some 'at the instance' of
certain great people wishing to do a good turn for a friend. Again, others
make a bargain with the collector, thus expressed, as for instance, 'John
de Swaffham is not in tithing. Amercement 2_s._ He paid 6_d._, the rest is
excused. He is quit.' Sometimes an entry is marked 'vad,' i.e. _vadiat_,
or _vadiatur_, 'he gives a pledge,' or, 'it is pledged.' The Collector had
seized a jug, or basin, or chair. But by far the larger number of entries
are marked 'd,' i.e. _debet_, 'he owes it.' The Collector had got nothing.
At the end of each (great) Leet is a collector's account of moneys
received and paid in to the Bailiffs or the City Chamberlain in three or
four or more payments. By drawing out a balance sheet for the whole city
in this year it appears that the total amount of all the amercements
entered is L72 18_s._ 10_d._ This is equivalent to more than L1000 at the
present value of money. But all that the Collectors can account for, even
after Easter, is L17 0_s._ 2_d._ It is clear that however efficient the
system was in preventing offences from passing undetected, it did not do
much to deter offenders from repeating them."
The enactments, of course, were still there on the city Statute-book;
and, if an example needed to be made of any specially obnoxious tradesman,
they might sometimes be enforced in all their theoretical rigour. In
general, however, the severity of the written law was scarcely realized
but by men with very tender consciences or with very few friends.
Forestalling in the market was one of the most heinous of civic offences;
yet, while John Doe was dutifully paying his morning orisons, Richard Roe
was "out at cockcrow to buy privately when the citizens were at Mass, so
that by six o'clock, there was nothing left in the market for the good
folk of the town."[141] Not less heinous was the selling of putrid
victuals. Here we do indeed find the theoretical horrors of the pillory
inflicted in all their rigour, but not once a year among the 40,000 people
of London.[142] These cannot have been the only offenders, or even an
appreciable fraction of them; for Chaucer's sarcasm as to the unwholesome
fare provided at cook-shops is borne out even more emphatically by others.
Cardinal Jacques de Vitry tells how a customer once pleaded for a
reduction in price "because I have bought no flesh but at your shop for
these last seven years." "What!" replied the Cook, "for so long a time,
and you are yet alive!" The author of "Piers Plowman" exhorts mayors to
apply the pillory more strictly to--
"Brewsters and bakers, butchers and cooks;
For these are men on this mould that most harm worken
To the poor people that piece-meal buyen:
For they poison the people privily and oft ..."
A lurid commentary on these lines may be found in a presentment of the
twelve jurors at the Norwich leet-court. "All the men of Sprowston sell
sausages and puddings and knowingly buy measly pigs; and they sell in
Norwich market the aforesaid sausages and pigs, unfit for human
bodies."[143]
This, of course, is only one side of city life: the side of which we catch
glimpses nowadays when the veil is lifted at Chicago. Rudimentary and
partial as city justice still was in Chaucer's days, overstrained in
theory and weak-kneed in practice, it was yet a part of real
self-government and of real apprenticeship to higher things in politics,
not only civic but national. The constitution of the city was frankly
oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a
constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against
encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or
even at the risk of bloodshed--this in itself was the thin end of the
democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed,
domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of
money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms
than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. But it was
these same men who, side by side with their brothers, the country
squires,[144] successfully asserted in Parliament the power of the purse,
and the right of asking even the King how he meant to spend the nation's
money, before they voted it for his use.
Moreover, it was due enormously to London and the great cities that our
national liberties were safeguarded from the foreign invader. The
considerable advance in national wealth between 1330 and 1430 was partly
due to our success in war. While English cities multiplied, French cities
had even in many cases to surrender into their King's hands those
liberties for which they were now too poor to render the correspondent
services. Yet, even before the first blow had been struck, those wars were
already half-won by English commerce. "The secret of the battles of Crecy
and Poitiers lies in the merchants' counting-houses of London, Bordeaux,
and Bruges."[145] Apart from those habits and qualities which successful
commerce implies, the amount of direct supplies in men and money
contributed by the English towns during Edward's wars can only be fully
realized by reading Dr. Sharpe's admirable prefaces to his "Calendars of
Letter-Books." But a single instance is brief and striking enough to be
quoted here.
Our crushing defeat by the combined French and Spanish navies off La
Rochelle in 1372 lost us the command of the sea until our victory at
Cadzand in 1387; and Chaucer's Merchant rightly voiced the crying need of
English commerce during that time--
He would the sea were kept, for any thing,
Betwixte Middelburgh and Orewell.
During those fifteen years the ports of the south coast were constantly
harried by privateers. The Isle of Wight was taken and plundered. The
Prior of Lewes, heading a hastily raised force against the invaders, was
taken prisoner at Rottingdean; and such efforts to clear the seas as were
made on our part were not public, but merely civic, or even private. The
men of Winchelsea and Rye burned a couple of Norman ports, after
plundering the very churches; and the sailors of Portsmouth and Dartmouth
collected a fleet which for a short while swept the Channel. This may be
the reason why Chaucer, writing two years later, makes his bold Shipman
hail from Dartmouth. But, seven years before this raid, a single London
merchant had done still more. A Scottish pirate named Mercer, reinforced
by French and Spanish ships, infested the North Sea until "God raised up
against him one of the citizens of Troynovant." "John Philpot, citizen of
London, a man of great wit, wealth and power, narrowly considering the
default or treachery of the Duke of Lancaster and the other Lords who
ought to have defended the realm, and pitying his oppressed countrymen,
hired with his own money a thousand armed men.... And it came to pass that
the Almighty, who ever helpeth pious vows, gave success to him and his, so
that his men presently took the said Mercer, with all that he had taken by
force from Scarborough, and fifteen more Spanish ships laden with much
riches. Whereat the whole people exulted ... and now John Philpot alone
was praised in all men's mouths and held in admiration, while they spake
opprobriously and with bitter blame of our princes and the host which had
long ago been raised, as is the wont of the common herd in their changing
moods."[146]
Walsingham's final moral here is, after all, that of Chaucer: "O stormy
people, unsad and ever untrue, Aye indiscreet, and changing as a
vane!"[147] English writers seem, indeed, to speak of their countrymen as
especially fickle and inconstant; and there was no doubt more reason for
the charge in those days, when men in general were far more swayed by
impulse and less by reflexion--when indeed the fundamental insecurity of
the social and political fabric was such as to thwart even the ripest
reflexion at every turn. It is striking how short-lived were the London
trading families until after Chaucer's time: no such succession as the
Rothschilds and Barings was as yet possible. Moreover, in civic as in
national politics, it was still possible to lose one's head for the crime
of having shown too much zeal in a losing cause, as the career of
Chaucer's colleague Brembre may testify.[148] Walsingham loses no
opportunity of jeering at the inconstancy of the London citizens; he
portrays their panic during the invasion scare of 1386, and during the
King's suppression of their liberties in 1389-92, with all the superiority
of a monk whose own skin was safe enough in the cloister of St. Alban's.
On this latter occasion the citizens had to pay Richard the enormous fine
of L20,000--or, according to a Malmesbury monk, L40,000--for the
restoration of their privileges; and even then they were glad to welcome
him on his first gracious visit "as an angel of God."[149] But they bided
their time, and Richard was to learn, like other sovereigns before and
since, how heavy a sword the Londoners could throw into the political
scale. Froissart noted that "they ever have been, are, and will be so long
as the City stands, the most powerful of all England"; that what London
thought was also what England thought; and that even a king might find he
had gained but a Pyrrhic victory over them. "For where the men of London
are at accord and fully agreed, no man dare gainsay them. They are of more
weight than all the rest of England, nor dare any man drive them to bay,
for they are most mighty in wealth and in men."[150]
However little Chaucer may have interested himself in his neighbours, here
were things which no poet could help seeing. The real history of Medieval
London is yet to be written; it will be a story of strange contrasts,
gold and brass and iron and clay. But there was a greatness in the very
disquiet and inconstancy of the city; some ideals were already fermenting
there which, realized only after centuries of conflict, have made modern
England what we are proud to see her; and other ideals of which we, like
our forefathers, can only say that we trust in their future realization.