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 regime 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.