s 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.

Under this current regime 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
shado