And all the while the scale on which the control of industry and the market is exercised goes on increasing; from which it follows that what was large enough for assured independence yesterday is no longer large enough for tomorrow. Seen from another direction, it is at the same time a division between those who live on free income and those who live by work, -- a division between the kept classes and the underlying community from which their keep is drawn. It is sometimes spoken of in this bearing -- particularly by certain socialists -- as a division between those who do no useful work and those who do; but this would be a hasty generalisation, since not a few of those persons who have no assured free income also do no work that is of material use, as e.g., menial servants. But the gravest significance of this cleavage that so runs through the population of the advanced industrial countries lies in the fact that it is a division between the vested interests and the common man. It is a division between those who control the conditions of work and the rate and volume of output and to whom the net output of industry goes as free income, on the one hand, and those others who have the work to do and to whom a livelihood is allowed by these persons in control, on the other hand. In point of numbers it is a very uneven division, of course.
A vested interest is a legitimate right to get something for nothing, usually a prescriptive right to an income which is secured by controlling the traffic at one point or another. The owners of such a prescriptive right are also spoken of as a vested interest. Such persons make up what are called the kept classes. But the kept classes also comprise many persons who are entitled to a free income on other grounds than their ownership and control of industry or the market, as, e.g., landlords and other persons classed as "gentry," the clergy, the Crown -- where there is a Crown -- and its agents, civil and military.
Contrasted with these classes who make up the vested interests, and who derive an income from the established order of ownership and privilege, is the common man. He is common in the respect that he is not vested with such a prescriptive right to get something for nothing. And he is called common because such is the common lot of men under the new order of business and industry; and such will continue (increasingly) to be the common lot so long as the enlightened principles of secure ownership and self-help handed down from the eighteenth century continue to rule human affairs by help of the new order of industry.
The kept classes, whose free income is secured to them by the legitimate rights of the vested interests, are less numerous than the common man -- less numerous by some ninety-five per cent or thereabouts -- and less serviceable to the community at large in perhaps the same proportion, so far as regards any conceivable use for any material purpose. In this sense they are uncommon.
But it is not usual to speak of the kept classes as the uncommon classes, inasmuch they personally differ from the common run of mankind in no sensible respect. It is more usual to speak of them as "the better classes," because they are in better circumstances and are better able to do as they like. Their place in the economic scheme of the civilised world is to consume the net product of the country's industry over cost, and so prevent a glut of the market.
But this broad distinction between the kept classes and their vested interests on the one side and the common man on the other side is by no means hard and fast. There are many doubtful cases, and a shifting across the line occurs now and again, but the broad distinction is not doubtful for all that. The great distinguishing mark of the common man is that he is helpless within the rules of the game as it is played in the twentieth century under the enlightened principles of the eighteenth century.
There are all degrees of this helplessness that characterises the common lot. So much so that certain classes, professions, and occupations -- such as the clergy, the military, the courts, police, and legal profession -- are perhaps to be classed as belonging primarily with the vested interests, although they can scarcely be counted as vested interests in their own right, but rather as outlying and subsidiary vested interests whose tenure is conditioned on their serving the purposes of those principal and self-directing vested interests whose tenure rests immediately on large holdings of invested wealth. The income which goes to these subsidiary or dependent vested interests is of the nature of free income, in so far that it is drawn from the yearly product of the underlying community; but in another sense it is scarcely to be counted as "free" income, in that its continuance depends on the good will of those controlling vested interests whose power rests on the ownership of large invested wealth. Still it will be found that on any test vote these subsidiary or auxiliary vested interests uniformly range themselves with their superiors in the same class, rather than with the common man. By sentiment and habitual outlook they belong with the kept classes, in that they are staunch defenders of that established order of law and custom which secures the great vested interests in power and insures the free income of the kept classes. In any twofold division of the population these are therefore, on the whole, to be ranged on the side of the old order, the vested interests, and the kept classes, both in sentiment and as regards the circumstances which condition their life and comfort.
