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.