Summing up his analogy (and exposition of it) in as few words as possible:
- Like the arch, societies of small properties do exist, and have persisted across ages.
- Just as the arch is “upheld by an equality of pressure of the separate stones upon each other”, in a healthy society “the moral pressure of different properties acts in exactly the same way”
- Both arches and societies of small properties continue to be built. He breezily cites the revolutions in France and Ireland as examples.