e 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 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. Statis