ticians 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 i