in the respect that pecuniary duties and obligations among them are similarly sacred and inviolable under the dispassionate findings of the law. This pecuniary equality is, in effect, an impersonal equality between pecuniary magnitudes; from which it follows that these citizens of the advanced nations are not ungraded men in the pecuniary respect; nor are they masterless, in so far as a greater pecuniary force will always, under this impersonal equality of the law, stand in a relation of mastery toward a lesser one.
Class distinctions, except pecuniary distinctions, have fallen away. But all these modern nations are made up of pecuniary classes, differing from one another by minute gradations in the marginal cases, but falling, after all, and in the large, into two broadly and securely distinguishable pecuniary categories: those who have more and those who have less. Statisticians have been at pains to ascertain that a relatively very small numerical minority of the citizens in these modern nations own all but a relatively very small proportion of the aggregate wealth in the country. So that it appears quite safe to say that in such a country as America, e.g., something less than ten percent of the inhabitants own something more than ninety percent of the country's wealth. It would scarcely be a wild overstraining of its practical meaning to say that this population is made up of two classes: those who own the country's wealth, and those who do not. In strict accuracy, as before the law, this characterisation will not hold; whereas in practical effect, it is a sufficiently close approximation. This latter class, who have substantially no other than a fancied pecuniary interest in the nation's material fortunes, are the category often spoken of as The Common Man. It is not necessary, nor is it desired,
to find a corresponding designation for the other category, those who own.
The articulate recognition of this division into contrasted pecuniary classes or conditions, with correspondingly (at least potentially) divergent pecuniary interests, need imply no degree of approval or disapproval of the arrangement which is so recognised. The recognition of it is necessary to a perspicuous control of the argument, as bears on the possible systematic and inherent discrepancy among these men in respect of their material interests under the projected Imperial rule. Substantially, it is a distinction between those who have and those who have not, and in a question of prospective pecuniary loss the man who has nothing to lose is differently placed from the one who has. It would perhaps seem flippant, and possibly lacking in the courtesy due one's prospective lord paramount, to say with the poet, Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.
But the whole case is not so simple. It is only so long as the projected pecuniary inroad is conceived as a simple sequestration of wealth in hand, that such a characterisation can be made to serve. The Imperial aim is not a passing act of pillage, but a perpetual usufruct; and the whole question takes on a different and more complex shape when it so touches the enduring conditions of life and livelihood. The citizen who has nothing, or who has no capitalisable source of unearned income, yet has a pecuniary interest in a livelihood to be gained from day to day, and he is yet vulnerable in the pecuniary respect in that his livelihood may with the utmost facility be laid under contribution by various and sundry well-tried contrivances. Indeed, the common man who depends for his livelihood on his daily earnings is in a more immediately
precarious position than those who have something appreciable laid up against a rainy day, in the shape of a capitalised source of income. Only that it is still doubtful if his position is precarious in such a fashion as to lay him open to a notable increase of hardship, or to loss of the amenities of life, in the same relative degree as his well-to-do neighbour.
In point of fact it may well be doubted if this common man has anything to apprehend in the way of added hardship or loss of creature comforts under the contemplated régime of Imperial tutelage. He would presumably find himself in a precarious case under the arbitrary and irresponsible authority of an alien master working through an alien master class. The doubt which presents itself is as to whether this common man would be more precariously placed, or would come in for a larger and surer sum of hard usage and scant living, under this projected order of things, than what he already is exposed to in his pecuniary relations with his well-to-do compatriots under the current system of law and order.
Under this current régime of law and order, according to the equitable principles of Natural Rights, the man without means has no pecuniary rights which his well-to-do pecuniary master is bound to respect. This may have been an unintended, as it doubtless was an unforeseen, outcome of the move out of feudalism and prescriptive rights and immunities, into the system of individual liberty and manhood franchise; but as commonly happens in case of any substantial change in the scheme of institutional arrangements, unforeseen consequences come in along with those that have been intended. In that period of history when Western Europe was gathering that experience out of which the current habitual scheme
of law and order has come, the right of property and free contract was a complement and safeguard to that individual initiative and masterless equality of men for which the spokesmen of the new era contended. That it is no longer so at every turn, or even in the main, in later time, is in great part due to changes of the pecuniary order, that have come on since then, and that seem not to have cast their shadow before.
In all good faith, and with none but inconsequential reservations, the material fortunes of modern civilised men—together with much else—have so been placed on a pecuniary footing, with little to safeguard them at any point except the inalienable right of pecuniary self-direction and initiative, in an environment where virtually all the indispensable means of pecuniary self-direction and initiative are in the hands of that contracted category of owners spoken of above. A numerical minority—under ten percent of the population—constitutes a conclusive pecuniary majority—over ninety percent of the means—under a system of law and order that turns on the inalienable right of owners to dispose of the means in hand as may suit their convenience and profit,—always barring recourse to illegal force or fraud. There is, however, a very appreciable margin of legal recourse to force and of legally protected fraud available in case of need. Of course the expedients here referred to as legally available force and fraud in the defense of pecuniary rights and the pursuit of pecuniary gain are not force and fraud de jure but only de facto. They are further, and well known, illustrations of how the ulterior consequences of given institutional arrangements and given conventionalised principles (habits of thought) of conduct may in time come to run at cross purposes with the initial purpose