As a further count, it is to be presumed that the burden of the Imperial government and its bureaucratic administration—what would be called the cost of maintenance and repairs of the dynastic establishment and its apparatus of control—would be borne by the subject peoples. Here again one is warranted in looking for a sub
stantial economy to be effected by such a centralised authority, and a consequent lighter aggregate burden on the subjects. Doubtless, the "overhead charges" would not be reduced to their practicable minimum. Such a governmental establishment, with its bureaucratic personnel, its "civil list" and its privileged classes, would not be conducted on anything like a parsimonious footing. There is no reason to apprehend any touch of modesty in the exactions of such a dynastic establishment for itself or in behalf of its underlying hierarchy of gentlefolk.
There is also to be counted in, in the concrete instance on which the argument here turns, a more or less considerable burden of contributions toward the maintenance and augmentation of that culture that has been the topic of so many encomiums. At this point it should be recalled that it is the pattern of Periclean Athens that is continually in mind in these encomiums. Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian center of culture. The vista of Denkmäler that so opens to the vision of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of things hoped for as should stir the heart of all humane persons.[8] The cost of this subvention of Culture would doubtless be appreciable, but those grave men who have spent most thought on this prospective cultural gain to be had from the projected Imperial rule appear to entertain no doubt as to its being worth all that it would cost.
Any one who is inclined to rate the prospective pecuniary costs and losses high would doubtless be able to find various and sundry items of minor importance to add to this short list of general categories on the side of cost; but such additional items, not fairly to be included under these general captions, would after all be of minor importance, in the aggregate or in detail, and would not appreciably affect the grand balance of pecuniary profit and loss to be taken account of in any appraisal of the projected Imperial régime. There should evidently be little ground to apprehend that its installation would entail a net loss or a net increase of pecuniary burdens. There is, of course, the ill-defined and scarcely definable item of expenditure under the general head of Gentility, Dignity, Distinction, Magnificence, or whatever term may seem suitable to designate that consumption of goods and services that goes to maintain the high repute of the Court and to keep the underlying gentlefolk in countenance. In its pecuniary incidence this line of (necessary) expenditure belongs under the rubric of Conspicuous Waste; and one will always have to face the disquieting flexibility of this item of expenditure. The consumptive demand of this kind is in an eminent degree "indefinitely extensible," as the phrasing of the economists would have it, and as various historical instances of courtly splendor and fashionable magnificence will abundantly substantiate. There is a constant proclivity to advance this conventional "standard of living" to the limit set by the available means; and yet these conventional necessities will ordinarily not, in the aggregate, take up all the available means; although now and again, as under the Ancien Régime, and perhaps in Imperial Rome, the standard of splendid living may also exceed the current means in
hand and lead to impoverishment of the underlying community.
An analysis of the circumstances governing this flexibility of the conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil service, therefore, would be a matter of estimate, on which no close agreement would be expected; and yet, here as in an earlier connection, it seems a reasonable expectation that sufficient dignity and magnificence could be put in evidence by such a large-scale establishment at a lower aggregate cost than the aggregate of expenditures previously incurred for the like ends by various nations working in severalty and at cross purposes.
Doubtless it would be altogether a mistaken view of this production of dignity by means of a lavish expenditure on superfluities, to believe that the same principle of economy should apply here as was found applicable in the matter of armament for defense. With the installation of a collective national establishment, to include substantially all the previously competing nations, the need of defensive armament should in all reason decline to something very inconsiderable indeed. But it would be hasty to conclude that with the coalescence of these nations under one paramount control the need of creating notoriety and prestige for this resulting central establishment by the consumption of decorative superfluities would likewise decline. The need of such dignity and magnificence is only in part, perhaps a minor part, of a defensive character. For the
greater part, no doubt, the motive to this conspicuously wasteful consumption is personal vanity, in Imperial policy as well as in the private life of fashion,—or perhaps one should more deferentially say that it is a certain range of considerations which would be identified as personal vanity in case they were met with among men beneath the Imperial level. And so far as the creation of this form of "good-will" by this manner of advertising is traceable to such, or equivalent, motives of a personal incidence, the provocation to economy along this line would presumably not be a notable factor in the case. And one returns perforce to the principle already spoken of above, that the consumptive need of superfluities is indefinitely extensible, with the resulting inference that nothing conclusive is to be said as to the prospective magnitude of this item in the Imperial bill of expense, or of the consequent pecuniary burdens which it would impose on the underlying peoples.
So far the argument has run on the pecuniary incidence of this projected Imperial dominion as it falls on the underlying community as a whole, with no attempt to discriminate between the divergent interests of the different classes and conditions of men that go to make up any modern community. The question in hand is a question of pecuniary burdens, and therefore of the pecuniary interests of these several distinguishable classes or conditions of men. In all these modern nations that now stand in the article of decision between peace by submission or a doubtful and melancholy alternative,—in all of them men are by statute and custom inviolably equal before the law, of course; they are ungraded and masterless men before the law. But these same peoples are also alike