 Such a resolution, if it lasts, may amount over time to a ratification of de facto holdings as de jure property. As with Locke’s account, the state comes into the picture much later to reinforce conventions of property that emerge informally in this way (ibid., pp. 534 ff.). But notice how much more modest Hume’s story is than the Lockean account in the moral claims that it makes (see Waldron 1994). The stability of the emergent distribution has nothing to do with its justice, nor with the moral quality of the actions by which goods were appropriated. It may be fair or unfair, equal or unequal, but the parties already know that they cannot hope for a much better distribution by pitching their own strength yet again against that of others. (See also Buchanan 1975 for a modern version of this approach.)