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The Theory of the Leisure Class

by Thorstein Veblen · English · Gutenberg #833 · 661,874 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class

Author: Thorstein Veblen


        
Release date: March 1, 1997 [eBook #833]
                Most recently updated: July 19, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833

Credits: Produced by David Reed, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS ***




Produced by David Reed





THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

by Thorstein Veblen





Chapter One ~~ Introductory


The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at
the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal
Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between
classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking
economic significance in these class differences is the distinction
maintained between the employments proper to the several classes.
The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial
occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree
of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any
feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the priestly
office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior second. But the
rule holds with but slight exceptions that, whether warriors or priests,
the upper classes are exempt from industrial employments, and this
exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank. Brahmin
India affords a fair illustration of the industrial exemption of both
these classes. In the communities belonging to the higher barbarian
culture there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there is a
corresponding differentiation of employments between these sub-classes.
The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly
classes, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the
class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic
characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class
occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare,
religious observances, and sports.

At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure
class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class
distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are
so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this
stage of the development in good form, with the exception that, owing
to the absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of
honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of
the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a community there is
a rigorous distinction between classes and between the occupations
peculiar to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to
do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes
slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women. If there
are several grades of aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly
exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar
kinds of manual labour. The men of the upper classes are not only
exempt, but by prescriptive custom they are debarred, from all
industrial occupations. The range of employments open to them is rigidly
defined. As on the higher plane already spoken of, these employments are
government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines
of activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
the highest rank--the kings or chieftains--these are the only kinds of
activity that custom or the common sense of the community will allow.
Indeed, where the scheme is well developed even sports are accounted
doubtfully legitimate for the members of the highest rank. To the lower
grades of the leisure class certain other employments are open, but they
are employments that are subsidiary to one or another of these typical
leisure-class occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture
and care of arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing
and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these secondary
honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of an industrial
character and are only remotely related to the typical leisure-class
occupations.

If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the
lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully
developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the usages, motives,
and circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has
arisen, and indicates the steps of its early growth. Nomadic hunting
tribes in various parts of the world illustrate these more primitive
phases of the differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting
tribes may be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes
can scarcely be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between classes
on the basis of this difference of function, but the exemption of the
superior class from work has not gone far enough to make the designation
"leisure class" altogether applicable. The tribes belonging on this
economic level have carried the economic differentiation to the point
at which a marked distinction is made between the occupations of men and
women, and this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly
all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
employments out of which the industrial occupations proper develop at
the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar employments and
are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout observances. A very
nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in this matter.

This division of labour coincides with the distinction between the
working and the leisure class as it appears in the higher barbarian
culture. As the diversification and specialisation of employments
proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to divide the industrial
from the non-industrial employments. The man's occupation as it stands
at the earlier barbarian stage is not the original out of which any
appreciable portion of later industry has developed. In the later
development it survives only in employments that are not classed as
industrial,--war, politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office.
The only notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry
and certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting goods.
Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an outgrowth of
what is classed as woman's work in the primitive barbarian community.

The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the women.
It may even be that the men's work contributes as much to the food
supply and the other necessary consumption of the group. Indeed, so
obvious is this "productive" character of the men's work that in the
conventional economic writings the hunter's work is taken as the type of
primitive industry. But such is not the barbarian's sense of the matter.
In his own eyes he is not a labourer, and he is not to be classed with
the women in this respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the
women's drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit
of its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
communities a profound sense of the disparity between man's and woman's
work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the group, but it is
felt that it does so through an excellence and an efficacy of a kind
that cannot without derogation be compared with the uneventful diligence
of the women.

At a farther step backward in the cultural scale--among savage
groups--the differentiation of employments is still less elaborate
and the invidious distinction between classes and employments is less
consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive
savage culture are hard to find. Few of these groups or communities
that are classed as "savage" show no traces of regression from a more
advanced cultural stage. But there are groups--some of them apparently
not the result of retrogression--which show the traits of primitive
savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the
barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence,
in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of primitive
savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic classes make up but a
small and inconspicuous fraction of the human race. As good an instance
of this phase of culture as may be had is afforded by the tribes of the
Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of
these groups at the time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems
to have been nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure
class. As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo groups. Some Pueblo communities
are less confidently to be included in the same class. Most, if not all,
of the communities here cited may well be cases of degeneration from a
higher barbarism, rather than bearers of a culture that has never risen
above its present level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be
taken with the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence
to the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.

These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
another also in certain other features of their social structure
and manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic)
structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and
individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system.
At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of
existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual
ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the
most peaceable--perhaps all the characteristically peaceable--primitive
groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such
communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force
or fraud.

The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities
at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a
leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive
savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from
a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions
apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting
of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the
inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the
infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of
a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a
routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth
of an early discrimination between employments, according to which
some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient
distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
appreciable element of exploit enters.

This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the light of
that modern common sense which has guided economic discussion, it seems
formal and insubstantial. But it persists with great tenacity as
a commonplace preconception even in modern life, as is shown, for
instance, by our habitual aversion to menial employments. It is a
distinction of a personal kind--of superiority and inferiority. In the
earlier stages of culture, when the personal force of the individual
counted more immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events,
the element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of life.
Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree. Consequently a
distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more imperative and more
definitive then than is the case to-day. As a fact in the sequence of
development, therefore, the distinction is a substantial one and rests
on sufficiently valid and cogent grounds.

The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made
changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed
changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial
upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given
ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually
apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and
values them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and
classifying the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a
working theory or scheme of life. The particular point of view, or the
particular characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the
classification of the facts of life depends upon the interest from which
a discrimination of the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination,
and the norm of procedure in classifying the facts, therefore,
progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds; for the end for
which the facts of life are apprehended changes, and the point of view
consequently changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient
and decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class at
one stage of culture will not retain the same relative importance for
the purposes of classification at any subsequent stage.

But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it
seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial
and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and
drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and
public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the
material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same
as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has
not fallen into disuse.

The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any
effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose
is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man
by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed
to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment
is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have
best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include
man's power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental
forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.

In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day.
In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian
culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between
two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian
man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt
antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not
conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute
creation, but between animate and inert things.

It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not
the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not
cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such
a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous
animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not
ordinarily apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively.
As here used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension of the
animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of a real or
imputed habit of initiating action. This category comprises a large
number and range of natural objects and phenomena. Such a distinction
between the inert and the active is still present in the habits of
thought of unreflecting persons, and it still profoundly affects the
prevalent theory of human life and of natural processes; but it does not
pervade our daily life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and belief.

To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of what is
afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different plane from his
dealings with "animate" things and forces. The line of demarcation may
be vague and shifting, but the broad distinction is sufficiently real
and cogent to influence the barbarian scheme of life. To the class of
things apprehended as animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding
of activity directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate" fact.
Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with activity
that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only terms that are
ready to hand--the terms immediately given in his consciousness of his
own actions. Activity is, therefore, assimilated to human action, and
active objects are in so far assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena
of this character--especially those whose behaviour is notably
formidable or baffling--have to be met in a different spirit and with
proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing with
inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a work of
exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of prowess, not of
diligence.

Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and
the animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall
into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and
industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a
new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive
("brute") material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome
useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies
previously directed to some other end by an other agent. We still speak
of "brute matter" with something of the barbarian's realisation of a
profound significance in the term.

The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference
between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular
force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must
early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general
range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the
males as being the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden
and violent strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in physiological
character, and in temperament may be slight among the members of the
primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be relatively slight and
inconsequential in some of the more archaic communities with which we
are acquainted--as for instance the tribes of the Andamans. But so soon
as a differentiation of function has well begun on the lines marked
out by this difference in physique and animus, the original difference
between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of selective
adaptation to the new distribution of employments will set in,
especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the group is in
contact is such as to call for a considerable exercise of the sturdier
virtues. The habitual pursuit of large game requires more of the manly
qualities of massiveness, agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore
scarcely fail to hasten and widen the differentiation of functions
between the sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact
with other groups, the divergence of function will take on the developed
form of a distinction between exploit and industry.

In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied
men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what other work there is
to do--other members who are unfit for man's work being for this purpose
classed with women. But the men's hunting and fighting are both of the
same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior
and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women's
assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted
productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure.
Such being the barbarian man's work, in its best development and widest
divergence from women's work, any effort that does not involve an
assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition
gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a
canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally
possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such
as proceeds on the basis of prowess--force or fraud. When the predatory
habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it
becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy
to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as
attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience
those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but
must send his woman to perform that baser office.

As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are
unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour,
as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence
in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is
therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.

As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity--"teleological"
activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency
and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude
or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison
of one person with another in point of efficiency, the instinct of
workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious comparison of
persons. The extent to which this result follows depends in some
considerable degree on the temperament of the population. In any
community where such an invidious comparison of persons is habitually
made, visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility as a
basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise is avoided by putting
one's efficiency in evidence. The result is that the instinct of
workmanship works out in an emulative demonstration of force.

During that primitive phase of social development, when the community is
still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a developed
system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can
be shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to
further the life of the group. What emulation of an economic kind there
is between the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to emulation
is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.

When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase
of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the
incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity
of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an
invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows
continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of
prowess--trophies--find a place in men's habits of thought as an
essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of
the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent
force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As accepted at
this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion
is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or
compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of successful contest.
Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than
seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The
performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls
under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction
in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand.
Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity
imputed to it.

With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion
has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than
assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is "formidable"; "worthy" is
"prepotent". A honorific act is in the last analysis little if
anything else than a recognised successful act of aggression; and where
aggression means conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes
to be especially and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong
hand. The naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of
force in terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in
vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a more advance
culture, commonly bear the stamp of this unsophisticated sense of
honour. Epithets and titles used in addressing chieftains, and in the
propitiation of kings and gods, very commonly impute a propensity for
overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person
who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in
heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to
enforce the same view.

Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
taking of life--the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
or human--is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of
slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a
glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even
in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the
dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.

It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
groups of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a
subsequent stage at which fighting is the avowed and characteristic
employment of the group. But it is not implied that there has been an
abrupt transition from unbroken peace and good-will to a later or higher
phase of life in which the fact of combat occurs for the first time.
Neither is it implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the
transition to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe
to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the habits
of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the
well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.

It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the
occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind--a prevalent habit
of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude
has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the
members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the
current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and
things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.

The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any
group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly
impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
points of view.

The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
as habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the
foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind as to develop and
conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.

The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
human nature under the modern culture.




Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation

In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.
In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different
aspects of the same general facts of social structure.

It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure
and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither
does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.
The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning
of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful
articles to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin
and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the
beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable
claim on the other hand.

The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure
and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and
women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest
form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men
of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and
truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it
is an ownership of the woman by the man.

There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the
custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of existing archaic
communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such
a view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually
appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but
these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who
appropriates and consumes them. The habitual appropriation and
consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without
raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a
conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things.

The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture,
apparently with the seizure of female captives. The original reason
for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their
usefulness as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy
as trophies, gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a
household with a male head. This was followed by an extension of slavery
to other captives and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of
ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the enemy.
The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life,
therefore, has been on the one hand a form of marriage resting on
coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership. The two
institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their
development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put
their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their
exploits. Both also minister to that propensity for mastery which
pervades all predatory communities. From the ownership of women the
concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their
industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of
persons.

In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
installed. And although in the latest stages of the development,
the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most
obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost
its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's prepotence.

Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character of a
struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary
in economic theory, and especially among those economists who adhere
with least faltering to the body of modernised classical doctrines, to
construe this struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for
subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during
the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its
character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict
as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the
means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an advance is
presently made beyond this early stage of technological development.
Industrial efficiency is presently carried to such a pitch as to afford
something appreciably more than a bare livelihood to those engaged in
the industrial process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to
speak of the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as
a competition for an increase of the comforts of life,--primarily for
an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of goods
affords.

The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the
consumption of the goods accumulated--whether it is consumption directly
by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for
this purpose identified with him in theory. This is at least felt to
be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is
incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of
course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants--his
physical comfort--or his so-called higher wants--spiritual, aesthetic,
intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all
economic readers.

But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning
that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which
accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive that lies at the root
of ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues
active in the further development of the institution to which it has
given rise and in the development of all those features of the social
structure which this institution of ownership touches. The possession of
wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally
cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other
conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any
incentive to accumulation of wealth.

It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where nearly
all goods are private property the necessity of earning a livelihood
is a powerful and ever present incentive for the poorer members of
the community. The need of subsistence and of an increase of physical
comfort may for a time be the dominant motive of acquisition for those
classes who are habitually employed at manual labour, whose subsistence
is on a precarious footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate
little; but it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in
the case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive of
physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed. On the
other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of the community
who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of wealth, the incentive
of subsistence or of physical comfort never plays a considerable part.
Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated
to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset
the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and
by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage
of the development.

Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the successful
raid. So long as the group had departed and so long as it still stood
in close contact with other hostile groups, the utility of things or
persons owned lay chiefly in an invidious comparison between their
possessor and the enemy from whom they were taken. The habit of
distinguishing between the interests of the individual and those of
the group to which he belongs is apparently a later growth. Invidious
comparison between the possessor of the honorific booty and his less
successful neighbours within the group was no doubt present early as an
element of the utility of the things possessed, though this was not at
the outset the chief element of their value. The man's prowess was
still primarily the group's prowess, and the possessor of the booty
felt himself to be primarily the keeper of the honour of his group. This
appreciation of exploit from the communal point of view is met with also
at later stages of social growth, especially as regards the laurels of
war.

But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious comparison
on which private property rests will begin to change. Indeed, the one
change is but the reflex of the other. The initial phase of ownership,
the phase of acquisition by naive seizure and conversion, begins to pass
into the subsequent stage of an incipient organization of industry on
the basis of private property (in slaves); the horde develops into a
more or less self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come
to be valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as
evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other
individuals within the community. The invidious comparison now becomes
primarily a comparison of the owner with the other members of the
group. Property is still of the nature of trophy, but, with the cultural
advance, it becomes more and more a trophy of successes scored in the
game of ownership carried on between the members of the group under the
quasi-peaceable methods of nomadic life.

Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced predatory activity
in the community's everyday life and in men's habits of thought,
accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory
exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success. With the
growth of settled industry, therefore, the possession of wealth gains in
relative importance and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and
esteem. Not that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more
direct evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory aggression or
warlike exploit ceases to call out the approval and admiration of the
crowd, or to stir the envy of the less successful competitors; but
the opportunities for gaining distinction by means of this direct
manifestation of superior force grow less available both in scope and
frequency. At the same time opportunities for industrial aggression, and
for the accumulation of property, increase in scope and availability.
And it is even more to the point that property now becomes the
most easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success as
distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore becomes
the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession in some amount becomes
necessary in order to any reputable standing in the community. It
becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire property, in order to
retain one's good name. When accumulated goods have in this way once
become the accepted badge of efficiency, the possession of wealth
presently assumes the character of an independent and definitive basis
of esteem. The possession of goods, whether acquired aggressively by
one's own exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The possession
of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an evidence of
efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself a meritorious act.
Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable and confers honour on
its possessor. By a further refinement, wealth acquired passively by
transmission from ancestors or other antecedents presently becomes even
more honorific than wealth acquired by the possessor's own effort;
but this distinction belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the
pecuniary culture and will be spoken of in its place.

Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the highest
popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has become the basis
of common place reputability and of a blameless social standing.
The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory
efficiency are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those
peoples who have passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory
culture. According to popular award, the highest honours within human
reach may, even yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary
predatory efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in
statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing in the
community these means of repute have been replaced by the acquisition
and accumulation of goods. In order to stand well in the eyes of the
community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite,
conventional standard of wealth; just as in the earlier predatory stage
it is necessary for the barbarian man to come up to the tribe's standard
of physical endurance, cunning, and skill at arms. A certain standard
of wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the other, is a necessary
condition of reputability, and anything in excess of this normal amount
is meritorious.

Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the esteem
of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in their own
esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by
one's neighbours. Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in
the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of
their fellows. Apparent exceptions to the rule are met with, especially
among people with strong religious convictions. But these apparent
exceptions are scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly
fall back on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness of
their deeds.

So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular
esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the complacency which
we call self-respect. In any community where goods are held in severalty
it is necessary, in order to his own peace of mind, that an individual
should possess as large a portion of goods as others with whom he is
accustomed to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to
possess something more than others. But as fast as a person makes new
acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of
wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater
satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any case is
constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure
for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new
standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of one's
self as compared with one's neighbours. So far as concerns the present
question, the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison
with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long
as the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal,
average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present
lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary
standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this
chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place
a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and
this average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so
favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate
himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for
pecuniary reputability.

In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the
average or general desire for wealth is out of the question. However
widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general
increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating
this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every
one else in the accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the
incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical
comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might
conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial
efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for
reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to
a definitive attainment is possible.

What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no
other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to
excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of one's
fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and security from want is
present as a motive at every stage of the process of accumulation in
a modern industrial community; although the standard of sufficiency in
these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary
emulation. To a great extent this emulation shapes the methods and
selects the objects of expenditure for personal comfort and decent
livelihood.

Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of
his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the
naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed
and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with
which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage,
where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this
propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his
scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes
only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which
it directs the man's activity. Under the regime of individual ownership
the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded
by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding
antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the
propensity for achievement--the instinct of workmanship--tends more
and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary
achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary
comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action. The
currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of
a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to
futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It
acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting
with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of
shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort comes to
mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable
showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives which lead men to
accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope and intensity, therefore,
continues to belong to this motive of pecuniary emulation.

In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be unnecessary to
remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or
deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise. The
term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons
with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or
value--in an aesthetic or moral sense--and so awarding and defining
the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be
contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious comparison is a
process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.




Chapter Three ~~ Conspicuous Leisure

If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or other
features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of such a
pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline would be to
make men industrious and frugal. This result actually follows, in some
measure, so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means of
acquiring goods is productive labour. This is more especially true
of the labouring classes in a sedentary community which is at an
agricultural stage of industry, in which there is a considerable
subdivision of industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these
classes a more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the imputation
of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them, at least not
within their class. Rather, since labour is their recognised and
accepted mode of life, they take some emulative pride in a reputation
for efficiency in their work, this being often the only line of
emulation that is open to them. For those for whom acquisition and
emulation is possible only within the field of productive efficiency
and thrift, the struggle for pecuniary reputability will in some
measure work out in an increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain
secondary features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of,
come in to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among the
superior class.

But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which we
are here immediately concerned. For this class also the incentive
to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action is so greatly
qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary emulation, that any
inclination in this direction is practically overborne and any incentive
to diligence tends to be of no effect. The most imperative of these
secondary demands of emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is
the requirement of abstention from productive work. This is true in an
especial degree for the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory
culture labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought
with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of
inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his
best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is felt to be debasing,
and this tradition has never died out. On the contrary, with the advance
of social differentiation it has acquired the axiomatic force due to
ancient and unquestioned prescription.

In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient
merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in
evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the
evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and
to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert, but it is of
scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency.
In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is
comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and
by exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his habitual
standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind
and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be a slight upon his
human dignity, even apart from all conscious consideration of the
approval or disapproval of his fellows.

The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable
in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force
even today. So much so that there are few of the better class who are not
possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour.
We have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an
especial degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of
thought with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste
that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that
is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations
are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with
life on a satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the
days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and
of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the
immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised by
thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a
blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of
leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of
wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in part
a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the respect
of others, and in part it is the result of a mental substitution. The
performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of
inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be
regarded as intrinsically base.

During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows the
predatory stage, a life of leisure is the readiest and most conclusive
evidence of pecuniary strength, and therefore of superior force;
provided always that the gentleman of leisure can live in manifest ease
and comfort. At this stage wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the
benefits accruing from the possession of riches and power take the
form chiefly of personal service and the immediate products of personal
service. Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional
index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive
labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with
a reputable standing in the community. Habits of industry and thrift,
therefore, are not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary
emulation. On the contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly
discountenances participation in productive labour. Labour would
unavoidably become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under
the ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is
to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men, and this tradition
is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage from the predatory to
the quasi-peaceable manner of life.

Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the
first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour
attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come in
as one of the early consequences of ownership. And it is to be remarked
that while the leisure class existed in theory from the beginning of
predatory culture, the institution takes on a new and fuller meaning
with the transition from the predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary
stage of culture. It is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact
as well as in theory. From this point dates the institution of the
leisure class in its consummate form.

During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the leisure
and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial distinction only.
The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from whatever is in their
apprehension, menial drudgery; but their activity in fact contributes
appreciably to the sustenance of the group. The subsequent stage of
quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established
chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and
shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer
dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of
activity that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption
from all useful employment.

The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature
phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its
earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout
observances. Persons unduly given to difficult theoretical niceties
may hold that these occupations are still incidentally and indirectly
"productive"; but it is to be noted as decisive of the question in hand
that the ordinary and ostensible motive of the leisure class in
engaging in these occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by
productive effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government
and war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of
those who engage in them; but it is gain obtained by the honourable
method of seizure and conversion. These occupations are of the nature of
predatory, not of productive, employment. Something similar may be said
of the chase, but with a difference. As the community passes out of the
hunting stage proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on chiefly
for gain; and from this the element of exploit is virtually absent,
or it is at any rate not present in a sufficient degree to clear the
pursuit of the imputation of gainful industry. On the other hand, the
chase is also a sport--an exercise of the predatory impulse simply.
As such it does not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it
contains a more or less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter
development of the chase--purged of all imputation of handicraft--that
alone is meritorious and fairly belongs in the scheme of life of the
developed leisure class.

Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act,
but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on
property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious
during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention
from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore
the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the
meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on
leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established
laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this
conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought
as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling;
while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making
labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally
impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy
life.

This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density
and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the
constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in
scope and consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to
accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency,
acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high minded and
impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or privation.
Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to
work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a
sense spurious, leisure class--abjectly poor and living in a precarious
life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful
pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days
are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense
of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all
civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary
culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been
habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual
labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even
set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with
their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in
part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person.
The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and
so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the
tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility
of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the
Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would
at first appear. A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable
one, is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost
his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good
form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his
master's seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered
his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved
his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination. Summum crede nefas
animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used, does
not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive
consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a
sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence
of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the
life of the gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the
spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific
leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of
the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this
portion which is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for
the sake of his good name, be able to give a convincing account. He
should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not
spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly,
through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure
so spent--in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible,
lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by
handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.

The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material
product--commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it
is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may
serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. At a later phase
of the development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of
honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and
which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of
which it is the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as
human relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life
undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this process of
elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles,
degrees and insignia, typical examples of which are heraldic devices,
medals, and honorary decorations.

As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an
employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the
achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which remain as
its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.
But leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any
ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The criteria
of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form
of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are
quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of
processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance
of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge
of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of
syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other
household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and
equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from
which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through which they
first came into vogue, may have been something quite different from
the wish to show that one's time had not been spent in industrial
employment; but unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as
serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would
not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments
of the leisure class.

These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches of
learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of social
facts which shade off from the region of learning into that of physical
habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as manners and breeding,
polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial observances generally.
This class of facts are even more immediately and obtrusively presented
to the observation, and they therefore more widely and more imperatively
insisted on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It
is worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial observances
which are classed under the general head of manners hold a more
important place in the esteem of men during the stage of culture
at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as a mark of
reputability, than at later stages of the cultural development. The
barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is notoriously a more
high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns decorum, than any but the very
exquisite among the men of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or
at least it is currently believed, that manners have progressively
deteriorated as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon
the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the
modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code--or
as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life--among the
industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities
of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate
sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a
busy people testifies--all depreciation apart--to the fact that decorum
is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full
measure only under a regime of status.

The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.
The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the
higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of
expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages
owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to
show good-will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit
of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the
conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.
Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part
they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact. In
large part they are an expression of the relation of status,--a symbolic
pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.
Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the
consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character
to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios
of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial
observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the
ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual
survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly approached
as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.

Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility
only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it
presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over
symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in
popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in
themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure
independent of the facts which they originally prefigured. Deviations
from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all
men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an
adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of
the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the substantial
unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be condoned, but a
breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."

None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the
intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue
of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought
in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment
of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The
knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use.
Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense,
and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are
taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence
that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent
under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in
acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect. In the last
analysis the value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher
of a life of leisure. Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the
conventional means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some
proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of
pecuniary decency.

So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the sight
of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only in so far as
it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put in evidence and can
be measured and compared with products of the same class exhibited
by competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of
leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent
abstention from work, even where the subject does not take thought
of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and
mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure
in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a
persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person,
and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all the
suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the proficiency
in decorum that comes by the way of passive habituation, may be further
improved upon by taking thought and assiduously acquiring the marks
of honourable leisure, and then carrying the exhibition of these
adventitious marks of exemption from employment out in a strenuous and
systematic discipline. Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent
application of effort and expenditure may materially further the
attainment of a decent proficiency in the leisure-class properties.
Conversely, the greater the degree of proficiency and the more patent
the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater
the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their
acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence under the
competitive struggle for proficiency in good manners, it comes about
that much pains in taken with the cultivation of habits of decorum; and
hence the details of decorum develop into a comprehensive discipline,
conformity to which is required of all who would be held blameless in
point of repute. And hence, on the other hand, this conspicuous leisure
of which decorum is a ramification grows gradually into a laborious
drill in deportment and an education in taste and discrimination as
to what articles of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous
methods of consuming them.

In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of
producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by
shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in
the deliberate production of a cultured class--often with a very happy
effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as snobbery, a
syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is achieved in
the case of a goodly number of families and lines of descent. This
syncopated gentle birth gives results which, in point of serviceability
as a leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise
substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but less
arduous training in the pecuniary properties.

There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the latest
accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous means and methods
of consumption. Differences between one person and another in the
degree of conformity to the ideal in these respects can be compared,
and persons may be graded and scheduled with some accuracy and effect
according to a progressive scale of manners and breeding. The award
of reputability in this regard is commonly made in good faith, on
the ground of conformity to accepted canons of taste in the matters
concerned, and without conscious regard to the pecuniary standing or the
degree of leisure practised by any given candidate for reputability; but
the canons of taste according to which the award is made are constantly
under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous leisure, and are indeed
constantly undergoing change and revision to bring them into closer
conformity with its requirements. So that while the proximate ground of
discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and
abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and
patent waste of time. There may be some considerable range of variation
in detail within the scope of this principle, but they are variations of
form and expression, not of substance.

Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a direct
expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this element
of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced back to any
underlying ground of reputability to explain either its presence or the
approval with which it is regarded; but the same is not true of the code
of properties. These latter are expressions of status. It is of course
sufficiently plain, to any one who cares to see, that our bearing
towards menials and other pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing
of the superior member in a relation of status, though its manifestation
is often greatly modified and softened from the original expression of
crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in
great measure towards equals, expresses a more or less conventionalised
attitude of subservience. Witness the masterful presence of the
high-minded gentleman or lady, which testifies to so much of dominance
and independence of economic circumstances, and which at the same time
appeals with such convincing force to our sense of what is right and
gracious. It is among this highest leisure class, who have no superiors
and few peers, that decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression;
and it is this highest class also that gives decorum that definite
formulation which serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath.
And there also the code is most obviously a code of status and shows
most plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A
divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one habituated
to require subservience and to take no thought for the morrow, is the
birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at his best; and it is in
popular apprehension even more than that, for this demeanour is accepted
as an intrinsic attribute of superior worth, before which the base-born
commoner delights to stoop and yield.

As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe
that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of
persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have
apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the
utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3)
the utility of their services.

Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic development.
During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during the
earlier development of industry within the limits of this general stage,
the utility of their services seems commonly to be the dominant motive
to the acquisition of property in persons. Servants are valued for their
services. But the dominance of this motive is not due to a decline
in the absolute importance of the other two utilities possessed by
servants. It is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate
the utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means
of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral
one, they are the usual form of investment for a profit. To such an
extent may female slavery give its character to the economic life under
the quasi-peaceable culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit
of value among peoples occupying this cultural stage--as for instance in
Homeric times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and that the
women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human relation in such a
system is that of master and servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is
the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves engaged
in attendance on their master's person and in producing goods for him.

A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of the
servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial occupations
proper are removed more and more from all immediate relation to the
person of their owner. At the same time those servants whose office
is personal service, including domestic duties, come gradually to be
exempted from productive industry carried on for gain.

This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial
employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the
chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled habits of life,
wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes impracticable as a customary
source of supply. Where this cultural advance has been achieved, the
chief wife is ordinarily of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so
will hasten her exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which
the concept of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this
place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say that gentle
blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with
accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The women with these
antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for the sake of a resulting
alliance with her powerful relatives and because a superior worth is
felt to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and
great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her
father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of
her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her
occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants.
However completely she may be subject to her master, and however
inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her birth
has placed her, the principle that gentility is transmissible will act
to place her above the common slave; and so soon as this principle has
acquired a prescriptive authority it will act to invest her in some
measure with that prerogative of leisure which is the chief mark of
gentility. Furthered by this principle of transmissible gentility the
wife's exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it,
until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from
handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property becomes
massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard of wealth of
the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption from handicraft,
and in the course of time from menial domestic employments, will then
assert itself as regards the other wives, if such there are, and also as
regards other servants in immediate attendance upon the person of their
master. The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
which the servant stands to the person of the master.

If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the development of
a special class of personal or body servants is also furthered by the
very grave importance which comes to attach to this personal service.
The master's person, being the embodiment of worth and honour, is of
the most serious consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the
community and for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he
should have at his call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance
upon his person is not diverted from this their chief office by any
by-occupation. These specialised servants are useful more for show
than for service actually performed. In so far as they are not kept for
exhibition simply, they afford gratification to their master chiefly in
allowing scope to his propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of
the continually increasing household apparatus may require added labour;
but since the apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as
a means of good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this
qualification is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are
better served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation and
multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a concomitant
progressive exemption of such servants from productive labour. By virtue
of their serving as evidence of ability to pay, the office of such
domestics regularly tends to include continually fewer duties, and their
service tends in the end to become nominal only. This is especially true
of those servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in great
part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in
the evidence which this exemption affords of their master's wealth and
power.

After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above
women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men,
especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other menials
should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive than women.
They are better fitted for this work, as showing a larger waste of time
and of human energy. Hence it comes about that in the economy of the
leisure class the busy housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her
retinue of hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady
and the lackey.

In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from the
leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an occupation of
an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in large measure, of
a painstaking attention to the service of the master, or to the
maintenance and elaboration of the household paraphernalia; so that
it is leisure only in the sense that little or no productive work is
performed by this class, not in the sense that all appearance of
labour is avoided by them. The duties performed by the lady, or by the
household or domestic servants, are frequently arduous enough, and they
are also frequently directed to ends which are considered extremely
necessary to the comfort of the entire household. So far as these
services conduce to the physical efficiency or comfort of the master
or the rest of the household, they are to be accounted productive work.
Only the residue of employment left after deduction of this effective
work is to be classed as a performance of leisure.

But much of the services classed as household cares in modern everyday
life, and many of the "utilities" required for a comfortable existence
by civilised man, are of a ceremonial character. They are, therefore,
properly to be classed as a performance of leisure in the sense in which
the term is here used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary
from the point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly or
wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they partake of this
character they are imperative and requisite because we have been taught
to require them under pain of ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We
feel discomfort in their absence, but not because their absence results
directly in physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
discriminate between the conventionally good and the conventionally bad
take offence at their omission. In so far as this is true the labour
spent in these services is to be classed as leisure; and when performed
by others than the economically free and self-directed head of the
establishment, they are to be classed as vicarious leisure.

The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under
the head of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery,
especially where the competition for reputability is close and
strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life. Where this
happens, the domestic service which comprises the duties of this
servant class might aptly be designated as wasted effort, rather than as
vicarious leisure. But the latter term has the advantage of indicating
the line of derivation of these domestic offices, as well as of neatly
suggesting the substantial economic ground of their utility; for
these occupations are chiefly useful as a method of imputing pecuniary
reputability to the master or to the household on the ground that a
given amount of time and effort is conspicuously wasted in that behalf.

In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure
class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the
behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class.
This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class
proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The
leisure of the master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of
a proclivity for the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance
the master's own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of
the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a
performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed
to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure.
So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and not at the same time
a member of a lower order of the leisure class proper, his leisure
normally passes under the guise of specialised service directed to the
furtherance of his master's fulness of life. Evidence of this relation
of subservience is obviously present in the servant's carriage and
manner of life. The like is often true of the wife throughout the
protracted economic stage during which she is still primarily a
servant--that is to say, so long as the household with a male head
remains in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the leisure
class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an attitude of
subservience, but also the effects of special training and practice
in subservience. The servant or wife should not only perform certain
offices and show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative
that they should show an acquired facility in the tactics of
subservience--a trained conformity to the canons of effectual and
conspicuous subservience. Even today it is this aptitude and acquired
skill in the formal manifestation of the servile relation that
constitutes the chief element of utility in our highly paid servants, as
well as one of the chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.

The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously
know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain
desired mechanical results; he must above all, know how to effect these
results in due form. Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual
rather than a mechanical function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate
system of good form, specifically regulating the manner in which this
vicarious leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much because it
evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows
an absence of the servile attitude and temperament, but because, in
the last analysis, it shows the absence of special training. Special
training in personal service costs time and effort, and where it is
obviously present in a high degree, it argues that the servant who
possesses it, neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any
productive occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
extending far back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not
only as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and skilful
workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance over those
whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has utility also as
putting in evidence a much larger consumption of human service than
would be shown by the mere present conspicuous leisure performed by an
untrained person. It is a serious grievance if a gentleman's butler or
footman performs his duties about his master's table or carriage in
such unformed style as to suggest that his habitual occupation may be
ploughing or sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on
the master's part to procure the service of specially trained servants;
that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the consumption
of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a trained servant for
special service under the exacting code of forms. If the performance of
the servant argues lack of means on the part of his master, it defeats
its chief substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the evidence
they afford of the master's ability to pay.

What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of an
under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of inexpensiveness or
of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case. The connection is much
less immediate. What happens here is what happens generally. Whatever
approves itself to us on any ground at the outset, presently comes to
appeal to us as a gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our
habits of though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
canon of deportment shall maintain itself in favour, it must continue to
have the support of, or at least not be incompatible with, the habit
or aptitude which constitutes the norm of its development. The need of
vicarious leisure, or conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant
incentive to the keeping of servants. So long as this remains true it
may be set down without much discussion that any such departure from
accepted usage as would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in service
would presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an expensive
vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding the formation
of our taste,--of our sense of what is right in these matters,--and so
weeds out unconformable departures by withholding approval of them.

As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances,
the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance of
slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess,
but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher
wealth and position. Under this principle there arises a class of
servants, the more numerous the better, whose sole office is fatuously
to wait upon the person of their owner, and so to put in evidence his
ability unproductively to consume a large amount of service. There
supervenes a division of labour among the servants or dependents whose
life is spent in maintaining the honour of the gentleman of leisure.
So that, while one group produces goods for him, another group, usually
headed by the wife, or chief, consumes for him in conspicuous leisure;
thereby putting in evidence his ability to sustain large pecuniary
damage without impairing his superior opulence.

This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the development and
nature of domestic service comes nearest being true for that cultural
stage which was here been named the "quasi-peaceable" stage of industry.
At this stage personal service first rises to the position of an
economic institution, and it is at this stage that it occupies the
largest place in the community's scheme of life. In the cultural
sequence, the quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper,
the two being successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic
feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at the same time that
life at this stage still has too much of coercion and class antagonism
to be called peaceable in the full sense of the word. For many purposes,
and from another point of view than the economic one, it might as well
be named the stage of status. The method of human relation during this
stage, and the spiritual attitude of men at this level of culture, is
well summed up under the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise
the prevailing methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend
of industrial development at this point in economic evolution, the term
"quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns the communities
of the Western culture, this phase of economic development probably
lies in the past; except for a numerically small though very conspicuous
fraction of the community in whom the habits of thought peculiar to the
barbarian culture have suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.

Personal service is still an element of great economic importance,
especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but its
relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than it once
was. The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in the past
rather than in the present; and its best expression in the present is to
be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this
class the modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of
traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more archaic
cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance and their most
effective development.

In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances
available for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are highly
developed. So much so that body servants, or, indeed, domestic servants
of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the
ground of a canon of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier
usage. The only exception would be servants employed to attend on the
persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants properly
come under the head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic
servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real
exception to the rule.

The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in
the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that the
members of the household are unable without discomfort to compass the
work required by such a modern establishment. And the reason for their
being unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social
duties", and (2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there
is too much of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1)
Under the mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the members
of such a household are required to be ostensibly all spent in a
performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs,
sewing-circles, sports, charity organisations, and other like social
functions. Those persons whose time and energy are employed in these
matters privately avow that all these observances, as well as the
incidental attention to dress and other conspicuous consumption, are
very irksome but altogether unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of
conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has grown so
elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac,
wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot make way
with them in the required manner without help. Personal contact with the
hired persons whose aid is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is
commonly distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence
is endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in
this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence of domestic
servants, and of the special class of body servants in an eminent
degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the moral need of
pecuniary decency.

The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is made
up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast becoming a
species of services performed, not so much for the individual behoof of
the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken
as a corporate unit--a group of which the housewife is a member on a
footing of ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they
are performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage,
these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of
vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are
performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious leisure
is possible only on a basis of status or of hired service, the
disappearance of the relation of status from human intercourse at any
point carries with it the disappearance of vicarious leisure so far as
regards that much of life. But it is to be added, in qualification of
this qualification, that so long as the household subsists, even with a
divided head, this class of non-productive labour performed for the
sake of the household reputability must still be classed as vicarious
leisure, although in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure
performed for the quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as
formerly, for the proprietary head of the household.




Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption

In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure class
and its differentiation from the general body of the working classes,
reference has been made to a further division of labour,--that between
the different servant classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly
those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a
new, subsidiary range of duties--the vicarious consumption of goods.
The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in the
wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants' quarters.
Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious
consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of
food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the
domestic establishment.

But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an evidence
of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or less elaborate
system. The beginning of a differentiation in consumption even antedates
the appearance of anything that can fairly be called pecuniary strength.
It is traceable back to the initial phase of predatory culture, and
there is even a suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this
respect lies back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most
primitive differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in that it
is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the latter it does not
rest on a difference in accumulated wealth. The utility of consumption
as an evidence of wealth is to be classed as a derivative growth. It
is an adaption to a new end, by a selective process, of a distinction
previously existing and well established in men's habits of thought.

In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable superior
class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side, and a base
inferior class of labouring women on the other. According to the ideal
scheme of life in force at the time it is the office of the men to
consume what the women produce. Such consumption as falls to the women
is merely incidental to their work; it is a means to their continued
labour, and not a consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness
of life. Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as
a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it
becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially the consumption
of the more desirable things. The consumption of choice articles of
food, and frequently also of rare articles of adornment, becomes tabu to
the women and children; and if there is a base (servile) class of men,
the tabu holds also for them. With a further advance in culture this
tabu may change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character;
but whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is
maintained, whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the
features of the conventional scheme of consumption do not change
easily. When the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its
fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general principle, more
or less rigorously applied, is that the base, industrious class should
consume only what may be necessary to their subsistence. In the nature
of things, luxuries and the comforts of life belong to the leisure
class. Under the tabu, certain victuals, and more particularly certain
beverages, are strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of
intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption
are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the
base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence
with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are
obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the
length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to
prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite
of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness
and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark,
at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to
afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among
some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened
that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from
such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble"
or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a
superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference
of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain
expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably
lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble
class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds
force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on
the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples
of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its
imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is
observable that the women still in great measure practise the same
traditional continence with regard to stimulants.

This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of stimulants
practised by the women of the reputable classes may seem an excessive
refinement of logic at the expense of common sense. But facts within
easy reach of any one who cares to know them go to say that the
greater abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative
conventionality; and this conventionality is, in a general way,
strongest where the patriarchal tradition--the tradition that the woman
is a chattel--has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense which
has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no
means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says that the
woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her
sustenance,--except so far as her further consumption contributes to the
comfort or the good repute of her master. The consumption of luxuries,
in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the
consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such
consumption by others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In
communities where the popular habits of thought have been profoundly
shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may accordingly look for
survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to the extent of a
conventional deprecation of their use by the unfree and dependent class.
This is more particularly true as regards certain luxuries, the use of
which by the dependent class would detract sensibly from the comfort
or pleasure of their masters, or which are held to be of doubtful
legitimacy on other grounds. In the apprehension of the great
conservative middle class of Western civilisation the use of these
various stimulants is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these
objections; and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it
is precisely among these middle classes of the Germanic culture, with
their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties, that
the women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified tabu on
narcotics and alcoholic beverages. With many qualifications--with more
qualifications as the patriarchal tradition has gradually weakened--the
general rule is felt to be right and binding that women should consume
only for the benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents
itself that expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is
an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the sequel that
this exception is much more obvious than substantial. During the earlier
stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint,
especially consumption of the better grades of goods,--ideally all
consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum,--pertains normally
to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least
formally, after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private
ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or
on the petty household economy. But during the earlier quasi-peaceable
stage, when so many of the traditions through which the institution of a
leisure class has affected the economic life of later times were taking
form and consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional
law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to
conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as
an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the further
course of development.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the
staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical
efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as
regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the
best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel,
weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.
In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles
of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation
is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate
products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain
the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at
hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard,
fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is
an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure
to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and
demerit.

This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence
in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life,
but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of
leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,--the
man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid
stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes
incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and
the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable
viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets,
in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and
the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and
application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction
therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous
application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible
leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there
is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly
manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise
good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred
manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of
conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to
the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his
own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in
evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive
feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another
origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to
the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the
substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments,
such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this
end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a
comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He
consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to
the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable
to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host's
facility in etiquette.

In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial
kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings
probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these
motives are also present in the later development, but they do
not continue to be the sole motives. The latter-day leisure-class
festivities and entertainments may continue in some slight degree to
serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation
and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they
serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious
ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these
social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious
consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly
achievements in etiquette.

As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function
and structure, and there arises a differentiation within the class.
There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and grades. This
differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the
consequent inheritance of gentility. With the inheritance of gentility
goes the inheritance of obligatory leisure; and gentility of a
sufficient potency to entail a life of leisure may be inherited without
the complement of wealth required to maintain a dignified leisure.
Gentle blood may be transmitted without goods enough to afford a
reputably free consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of
impecunious gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already.
These half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of hierarchical
gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the highest grades of
the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of wealth, or
both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker. These lower
grades, especially the impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure,
affiliate themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the great
ones; by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They become
his courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and countenanced by
their patron they are indices of his rank and vicarious consumer of his
superfluous wealth. Many of these affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at
the same time lesser men of substance in their own right; so that some
of them are scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as
vicarious consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer
and hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer
without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the other
aristocracy of less degree, have in turn attached to their persons a
more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumer in the persons of
their wives and children, their servants, retainers, etc.

Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and vicarious
consumption the rule holds that these offices must be performed in some
such manner, or under some such circumstance or insignia, as shall point
plainly to the master to whom this leisure or consumption pertains,
and to whom therefore the resulting increment of good repute of right
inures. The consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their
master or patron represents an investment on his part with a view to an
increase of good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this is obvious
enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or patron here takes
place immediately, on the ground of common notoriety. Where leisure
and consumption is performed vicariously by henchmen and retainers,
imputation of the resulting repute to the patron is effected by their
residing near his person so that it may be plain to all men from what
source they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in
this way grows larger, more patent means are required to indicate the
imputation of merit for the leisure performed, and to this end uniforms,
badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing of uniforms or
liveries implies a considerable degree of dependence, and may even
be said to be a mark of servitude, real or ostensible. The wearers of
uniforms and liveries may be roughly divided into two classes-the free
and the servile, or the noble and the ignoble. The services performed
by them are likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the
distinction is not observed with strict consistency in practice; the
less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of the noble
functions are not infrequently merged in the same person. But the
general distinction is not on that account to be overlooked. What
may add some perplexity is the fact that this fundamental distinction
between noble and ignoble, which rests on the nature of the ostensible
service performed, is traversed by a secondary distinction into
honorific and humiliating, resting on the rank of the person for whom
the service is performed or whose livery is worn. So, those offices
which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are
noble; such as government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and
accoutrements, and the like--in short, those which may be classed as
ostensibly predatory employments. On the other hand, those employments
which properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as
handicraft or other productive labor, menial services and the like. But
a base service performed for a person of very high degree may become a
very honorific office; as for instance the office of a Maid of Honor or
of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, or the King's Master of the Horse or
his Keeper of the Hounds. The two offices last named suggest a principle
of some general bearing. Whenever, as in these cases, the menial service
in question has to do directly with the primary leisure employments
of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific
character. In this way great honor may come to attach to an employment
which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort. In the later
development of peaceable industry, the usage of employing an idle corps
of uniformed men-at-arms gradually lapses. Vicarious consumption by
dependents bearing the insignia of their patron or master narrows down
to a corps of liveried menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the
livery comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something
of a honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes obnoxious
to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed
from a state of effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the
sting of any imputation of servility. This antipathy asserts itself
even in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations
prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country
the aversion even goes the length of discrediting--in a mild and
uncertain way--those government employments, military and civil, which
require the wearing of a livery or uniform.

With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers
attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like
is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number
of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general way,
though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The
dependent who was first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the
chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the later development of
the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last.
In the higher grades of society a large volume of both these kinds of
service is required; and here the wife is of course still assisted in
the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials. But as we descend
the social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of
vicarious leisure and consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the
communities of the Western culture, this point is at present found among
the lower middle class.

And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance
that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the
part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it
has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the
business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and
its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial
community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of
the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to
turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake
largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary
business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure
and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious
performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality
which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is
by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work
with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render
for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the
time demands.

The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a
simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably
occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social
amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end
beyond showing that she does not occupy herself with anything that is
gainful or that is of substantial use. As has already been noticed under
the head of manners, the greater part of the customary round of domestic
cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is
of this character. Not that the results of her attention to household
matters, of a decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing
to the sense of men trained in middle-class proprieties; but the taste
to which these effects of household adornment and tidiness appeal is a
taste which has been formed under the selective guidance of a canon
of propriety that demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The
effects are pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find
them pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude for
a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends that are to
be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the term; and it is
not denied that effects having some substantial aesthetic value are
sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is here insisted on is that, as
regards these amenities of life, the housewife's efforts are under the
guidance of traditions that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously
wasteful expenditure of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is
achieved-and it is a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they
are-they must be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves
to the great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia are, on
the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on the other hand,
apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the
housewife.

The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale than the
requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which little if any
pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like,
is observable, and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at
ostensible leisure, decency still requires the wife to consume some
goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head.
So that, as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic
institution, the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of
the man, both in fact and in theory--the producer of goods for him to
consume--has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces.
But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the
habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding
mark of the unfree servant.

This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle
and lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the
leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary
grade does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the
leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second
remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in
point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of
worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes
incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilized
communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown
vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability
imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but
slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata.
The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of
decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their
good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform
to the accepted code, at least in appearance. The basis on which good
repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is
pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and
so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous
consumption of goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue
as far down the scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata
in which the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part
delegated to the wife and children of the household. Lower still, where
any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become impracticable for the
wife, the conspicuous consumption of goods remains and is carried on by
the wife and children. The man of the household also can do something
in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower
descent into the levels of indigence--along the margin of the slums--the
man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume
valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole
exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class of society,
not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous
consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not
given up except under stress of the direst necessity. Very much of
squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the
last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and
no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical
want as to deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual
need.

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and
consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes
of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both.
In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is
a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of
wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The
choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply,
except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety,
springing from a different source. On grounds of expediency the
preference may be given to the one or the other at different stages of
the economic development. The question is, which of the two methods will
most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired
to affect. Usage has answered this question in different ways under
different circumstances.

So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact
enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone that is
to say, so long as the human environment to which the individual is
required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within
his sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip--so long the
one method is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve
about equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when
the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach
a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as
an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true during the later,
peaceable economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility
of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many
persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than
the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make
while he is under their direct observation.

The modern organization of industry works in the same direction also by
another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently
place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there
is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition.
One's neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's
neighbors, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion
has a high degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing
one's pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's
everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In
the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance at large
gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is unknown; in such
places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the
like. In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain
one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's
pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs
may read. It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of
the development is in the direction of heightening the utility of
conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure.

It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a means
of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of decency, is
at its best in those portions of the community where the human contact
of the individual is widest and the mobility of the population is
greatest. Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of
the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is
also more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent
appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent
than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and
his wife and daughters are notoriously less modish in their dress, as
well as less urbane in their manners, than the city artisan's family
with an equal income. It is not that the city population is by nature
much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous
consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary
decency. But the provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its
transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method is
therefore more readily resorted to, and in the struggle to outdo one
another the city population push their normal standard of conspicuous
consumption to a higher point, with the result that a relatively greater
expenditure in this direction is required to indicate a given degree
of pecuniary decency in the city. The requirement of conformity to this
higher conventional standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency
is higher, class for class, and this requirement of decent appearance
must be lived up to on pain of losing caste.

Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the
city than in the country. Among the country population its place is to
some extent taken by savings and home comforts known through the medium
of neighborhood gossip sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of
Pecuniary repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in--where
the indulgence is found--are of course also in great part to be classed
as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is to be said of
the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid by by the artisan
class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the fact that in the case
of the artisan the savings are a less effective means of advertisement,
relative to the environment in which he is placed, than are the savings
of the people living on farms and in the small villages. Among the
latter, everybody's affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status,
are known to everybody else. Considered by itself simply--taken in the
first degree--this added provocation to which the artisan and the urban
laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously decrease the amount
of savings; but in its cumulative action, through raising the standard
of decent expenditure, its deterrent effect on the tendency to save
cannot but be very great.

A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and among
the lower middle class of the urban population generally Journeymen
printers may be named as a class among whom this form of conspicuous
consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it carries with it certain
well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits
of the class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an
ill-defined moral deficiency with which this class is credited, or to
a morally deleterious influence which their occupation is supposed to
exert, in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The
state of the case for the men who work in the composition and press
rooms of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned to
account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the inertia
due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation requires more
than the average of intelligence and general information, and the men
employed in it are therefore ordinarily more ready than many others to
take advantage of any slight variation in the demand for their labor
from one place to another. The inertia due to the home feeling is
consequently also slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are
high enough to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The
result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable body of
workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with new groups
of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or
ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time
being. The human proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of
good-fellowship, leads them to spend freely in those directions which
will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription seizes
upon the custom as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the
accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard
of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
direction--for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a
standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by
everyone in the trade.

The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among the
average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in some
measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more transient
character of acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the
substantial ground of this high requirement in dissipation is in the
last analysis no other than that same propensity for a manifestation
of dominance and pecuniary decency which makes the French
peasant-proprietor parsimonious and frugal, and induces the American
millionaire to found colleges, hospitals and museums. If the canon of
conspicuous consumption were not offset to a considerable extent by
other features of human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically
be impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or their
income might be.

But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its manifestation, and
some of these come in to accentuate or to qualify the broad, fundamental
canon of conspicuous waste. Under the simple test of effectiveness
for advertising, we should expect to find leisure and the conspicuous
consumption of goods dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty
evenly between them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected
gradually to yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic
development goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in importance,
both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed all the available
product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare livelihood. But the actual
course of development has been somewhat different from this ideal
scheme. Leisure held the first place at the start, and came to hold a
rank very much above wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct
exponent of wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during
the quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has
gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy,
though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin of production
above the subsistence minimum.

The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable
to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments.
Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly because it shows
exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic differentiation into noble and
ignoble classes is based on an invidious distinction between employments
as honorific or debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an
imperative canon of decency during the early quasi-peaceable stage.
Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is still fully as
effective an evidence of wealth as consumption. Indeed, so effective
is it in the relatively small and stable human environment to which the
individual is exposed at that cultural stage, that, with the aid of the
archaic tradition which deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise
to a large impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the
production of the community's industry to the subsistence minimum. This
extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because slave labor, working
under a compulsion more vigorous than that of reputability, is forced to
turn out a product in excess of the subsistence minimum of the working
class. The subsequent relative decline in the use of conspicuous
leisure as a basis of repute is due partly to an increasing relative
effectiveness of consumption as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is
traceable to another force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to
the usage of conspicuous waste.

This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other circumstances
permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with favor upon
productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use. It disposes them
to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The instinct of workmanship
is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse
circumstances. So that however wasteful a given expenditure may be in
reality, it must at least have some colorable excuse in the way of an
ostensible purpose. The manner in which, under special circumstances,
the instinct eventuates in a taste for exploit and an invidious
discrimination between noble and ignoble classes has been indicated in
an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes into conflict with the law of
conspicuous waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so
much in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futile.
Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its guidance touches
chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent violations of its
requirements. It is only less promptly and with less constraining force
that it reaches such substantial violations of its requirements as are
appreciated only upon reflection.

So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually
by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too constantly
and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the instinct of
workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial
usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status)
passes into the peaceable stage of industry (with wage labor and cash
payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play. It then begins
aggressively to shape men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts
itself at least as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All
extraneous considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a
vanishing minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment
of some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape some
object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may in large
measure be overborne by the more immediately constraining incentive to a
reputable leisure and an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it
may therefore work itself out in make-believe only; as for instance
in "social duties," and in quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly
accomplishments, in the care and decoration of the house, in
sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in proficiency at dress, cards,
yachting, golf, and various sports. But the fact that it may under
stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the
presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding instinct is
disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of china eggs.

This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of purposeful activity
that shall at the same time not be indecorously productive of either
individual or collective gain marks a difference of attitude between
the modern leisure class and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the
earlier stage, as was said above, the all-dominating institution
of slavery and status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion
directed to other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to
find some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way
of forcible aggression or repression directed against hostile groups or
against the subject classes within the group; and this served to relieve
the pressure and draw off the energy of the leisure class without a
resort to actually useful, or even ostensibly useful employments. The
practice of hunting also served the same purpose in some degree. When the
community developed into a peaceful industrial organization, and when
fuller occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking purposeful
employment was left to find an outlet in some other direction. The
ignominy which attaches to useful effort also entered upon a less acute
phase with the disappearance of compulsory labor; and the instinct
of workmanship then came to assert itself with more persistence and
consistency.

The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy
which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the
direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure
has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the
leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with
the tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability
which discountenances all employment that is of the nature of productive
effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing beyond the most
transient vogue to any employment that is substantially useful or
productive. The consequence is that a change has been wrought in the
conspicuous leisure practiced by the leisure class; not so much in
substance as in form. A reconciliation between the two conflicting
requirements is effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate
polite observances and social duties of a ceremonial nature are
developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious object of
amelioration embodied in their official style and title; there is much
coming and going, and a deal of talk, to the end that the talkers may
not have occasion to reflect on what is the effectual economic value of
their traffic. And along with the make-believe of purposeful employment,
and woven inextricably into its texture, there is commonly, if not
invariably, a more or less appreciable element of purposeful effort
directed to some serious end.

In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has gone
forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible idleness, as in
the best days of the patriarchal regime, the housewife of the advanced
peaceable stage applies herself assiduously to household cares. The
salient features of this development of domestic service have already
been indicated. Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous
expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the
obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's
good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to
be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the
consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with
the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum; and no
standard of expenditure could result from such a comparison, except the
most prosaic and unattractive level of decency. A standard of life would
still be possible which should admit of invidious comparison in other
respects than that of opulence; as, for instance, a comparison
in various directions in the manifestation of moral, physical,
intellectual, or aesthetic force. Comparison in all these directions is
in vogue today; and the comparison made in these respects is commonly
so inextricably bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely
distinguishable from the latter. This is especially true as regards the
current rating of expressions of intellectual and aesthetic force
or proficiency' so that we frequently interpret as aesthetic or
intellectual a difference which in substance is pecuniary only.

The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one. As
used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an undertone
of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term that will
adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and
it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate
expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic
theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate
than any other expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this
expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole,
not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as
viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If
he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility
to him, as compared with other forms of consumption that would not
be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever form of
expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his
choice, has utility to him by virtue of his preference. As seen from the
point of view of the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness
does not arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of
the word "waste" as a technical term, therefore, implies no deprecation
of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer under this canon of
conspicuous waste.

But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste" in the
language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is characterized
as wasteful. This common-sense implication is itself an outcropping of
the instinct of workmanship. The popular reprobation of waste goes to
say that in order to be at peace with himself the common man must
be able to see in any and all human effort and human enjoyment an
enhancement of life and well-being on the whole. In order to meet with
unqualified approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the
test of impersonal usefulness--usefulness as seen from the point of
view of the generically human. Relative or competitive advantage of
one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy the economic
conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has not the approval
of this conscience.

In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the ground of
an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to bring any given item
or element in under this head it is not necessary that it should
be recognized as waste in this sense by the person incurring the
expenditure. It frequently happens that an element of the standard of
living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming,
in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may
in this way become as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's
habitual expenditure. As items which sometimes fall under this head,
and are therefore available as illustrations of the manner in which this
principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries, silver table
service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched linen, many articles
of jewelry and of dress. The indispensability of these things after the
habit and the convention have been formed, however, has little to say
in the classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure must
be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the question whether it
serves directly to enhance human life on the whole-whether it furthers
the life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of
the instinct of workmanship, and that instinct is the court of final
appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a question
as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question
is, therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces to the
particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but whether,
aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and conventional
decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or in the fullness of life.
Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far
as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making
an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it
could not have become customary and prescriptive without the backing of
this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure should
be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of
conspicuous waste. An article may be useful and wasteful both, and its
utility to the consumer may be made up of use and waste in the most
varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of
their utility; although, in a general way, the element of waste tends
to predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of
articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible
to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose;
and on the other hand, even in special machinery and tools contrived for
some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances
of human industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the
habit of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It
would be hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from
the utility of any article or of any service, however obviously its
prime purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product that the
element of waste is in no way concerned in its value, immediately or
remotely.




Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of Living

For the great body of the people in any modern community, the proximate
ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort
is not a conscious effort to excel in the expensiveness of their visible
consumption, so much as it is a desire to live up to the conventional
standard of decency in the amount and grade of goods consumed. This
desire is not guided by a rigidly invariable standard, which must be
lived up to, and beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard
is flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time
is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and
for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that
follows such an increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a
scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed
scale in response to an accession of wealth. Many items of customary
expenditure prove on analysis to be almost purely wasteful, and they
are therefore honorific only, but after they have once been incorporated
into the scale of decent consumption, and so have become an integral
part of one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as
it is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physical
comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That is
to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that confers
spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than much of that
expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of physical well-being
or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as difficult to recede from a
"high" standard of living as it is to lower a standard which is already
relatively low; although in the former case the difficulty is a moral
one, while in the latter it may involve a material deduction from the
physical comforts of life.

But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous
expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes place almost as a
matter of course. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to
increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are
at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and
unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in
this respect. A prompt response to the stimulus, on the other hand,
is accepted as the normal effect. This suggests that the standard
of expenditure which commonly guides our efforts is not the average,
ordinary expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption
that lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some strain.
The motive is emulation--the stimulus of an invidious comparison which
prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing
ourselves. Substantially the same proposition is expressed in the
commonplace remark that each class envies and emulates the class next
above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those
below or with those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in
other words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of
emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability;
until, in this way, especially in any community where class distinctions
are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all
standards of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to
the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary
class--the wealthy leisure class.

It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what scheme of
Life the community shall accept as decent or honorific; and it is
their office by precept and example to set forth this scheme of social
salvation in its highest, ideal form. But the higher leisure class
can exercise this quasi-sacerdotal office only under certain material
limitations. The class cannot at discretion effect a sudden revolution
or reversal of the popular habits of thought with respect to any of
these ceremonial requirements. It takes time for any change to permeate
the mass and change the habitual attitude of the people; and especially
it takes time to change the habits of those classes that are socially
more remote from the radiant body. The process is slower where the
mobility of the population is less or where the intervals between the
several classes are wider and more abrupt. But if time be allowed, the
scope of the discretion of the leisure class as regards questions of
form and detail in the community's scheme of life is large; while as
regards the substantial principles of reputability, the changes which
it can effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its example and
precept carries the force of prescription for all classes below it; but
in working out the precepts which are handed down as governing the form
and method of reputability--in shaping the usages and the spiritual
attitude of the lower classes--this authoritative prescription
constantly works under the selective guidance of the canon of
conspicuous waste, tempered in varying degree by the instinct of
workmanship. To those norms is to be added another broad principle of
human nature--the predatory animus--which in point of generality and of
psychological content lies between the two just named. The effect of the
latter in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be discussed.
The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the economic
circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of spiritual maturity
of the particular class whose scheme of life it is to regulate. It is
especially to be noted that however high its authority and however true
to the fundamental requirements of reputability it may have been at
its inception, a specific formal observance can under no circumstances
maintain itself in force if with the lapse of time or on its
transmission to a lower pecuniary class it is found to run counter
to the ultimate ground of decency among civilized peoples, namely,
serviceability for the purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary
success. It is evident that these canons of expenditure have much to
say in determining the standard of living for any community and for any
class. It is no less evident that the standard of living which prevails
at any time or at any given social altitude will in its turn have much
to say as to the forms which honorific expenditure will take, and as
to the degree to which this "higher" need will dominate a people's
consumption. In this respect the control exerted by the accepted
standard of living is chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost
solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that
has once become habitual.

A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual scale
and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty in the way
of receding from an accustomed standard is the difficulty of breaking
a habit that has once been formed. The relative facility with which an
advance in the standard is made means that the life process is a process
of unfolding activity and that it will readily unfold in a new direction
whenever and wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But
when the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed outlet even
after a change has taken place in the environment whereby the external
resistance has appreciably risen. That heightened facility of expression
in a given direction which is called habit may offset a considerable
increase in the resistance offered by external circumstances to the
unfolding of life in the given direction. As between the various habits,
or habitual modes and directions of expression, which go to make up an
individual's standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in
point of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point
of the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a given
direction.

That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while men
are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any direction, they are
more reluctant to retrench in some directions than in others; so that
while any accustomed consumption is reluctantly given up, there are
certain lines of consumption which are given up with relatively extreme
reluctance. The articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer
clings with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is of
course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite and
invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand it may
be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite, aggregate of
consumption required for the maintenance of life. This minimum, it
may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in case of a progressive
retrenchment of expenditure. That is to say, in a general way, the
most ancient and ingrained of the habits which govern the individual's
life--those habits that touch his existence as an organism--are the
most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher
wants--later-formed habits of the individual or the race--in a somewhat
irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher
wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the
need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good repute, may
in some cases take precedence of the lower or more elementary wants. In
general, the longer the habituation, the more unbroken the habit, and
the more nearly it coincides with previous habitual forms of the life
process, the more persistently will the given habit assert itself. The
habit will be stronger if the particular traits of human nature which
its action involves, or the particular aptitudes that find exercise
in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely and profoundly
concerned in the life process or that are intimately bound up with the
life history of the particular racial stock. The varying degrees of ease
with which different habits are formed by different persons, as well as
the varying degrees of reluctance with which different habits are given
up, goes to say that the formation of specific habits is not a matter
of length of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and traits of
temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding
what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of
life. And the prevalent type of transmitted aptitudes, or in other words
the type of temperament belonging to the dominant ethnic element in
any community, will go far to decide what will be the scope and form
of expression of the community's habitual life process. How greatly the
transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a rapid
and definitive formation of habit in individuals is illustrated by the
extreme facility with which an all-dominating habit of alcoholism
is sometimes formed; or in the similar facility and the similarly
inevitable formation of a habit of devout observances in the case of
persons gifted with a special aptitude in that direction. Much the same
meaning attaches to that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific
human environment that is called romantic love.

Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of
the relative facility with which they unfold their life activity in
particular directions; and the habits which coincide with or proceed
upon a relatively strong specific aptitude or a relatively great
specific facility of expression become of great consequence to the man's
well-being. The part played by this element of aptitude in determining
the relative tenacity of the several habits which constitute the
standard of living goes to explain the extreme reluctance with which men
give up any habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous consumption.
The aptitudes or propensities to which a habit of this kind is to be
referred as its ground are those aptitudes whose exercise is comprised
in emulation; and the propensity for emulation--for invidious
comparison--is of ancient growth and is a pervading trait of human
nature. It is easily called into vigorous activity in any new form, and
it asserts itself with great insistence under any form under which it
has once found habitual expression. When the individual has once
formed the habit of seeking expression in a given line of honorific
expenditure--when a given set of stimuli have come to be habitually
responded to in activity of a given kind and direction under the
guidance of these alert and deep-reaching propensities of emulation--it
is with extreme reluctance that such an habitual expenditure is given
up. And on the other hand, whenever an accession of pecuniary strength
puts the individual in a position to unfold his life process in larger
scope and with additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race
will assert themselves in determining the direction which the new
unfolding of life is to take. And those propensities which are already
actively in the field under some related form of expression, which are
aided by the pointed suggestions afforded by a current accredited
scheme of life, and for the exercise of which the material means and
opportunities are readily available--these will especially have much to
say in shaping the form and direction in which the new accession to
the individual's aggregate force will assert itself. That is to say,
in concrete terms, in any community where conspicuous consumption is an
element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's ability
to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for some accredited
line of conspicuous consumption.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity
for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of
the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity
for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so
far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is
virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form
of conspicuous waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands
ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency
or output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have
been provided for. Where this result does not follow, under modern
conditions, the reason for the discrepancy is commonly to be sought in
a rate of increase in the individual's wealth too rapid for the habit of
expenditure to keep abreast of it; or it may be that the individual in
question defers the conspicuous consumption of the increment to a later
date--ordinarily with a view to heightening the spectacular effect
of the aggregate expenditure contemplated. As increased industrial
efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with
less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are
bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure,
rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. The strain is not
lightened as industrial efficiency increases and makes a lighter strain
possible, but the increment of output is turned to use to meet this
want, which is indefinitely expansible, after the manner commonly
imputed in economic theory to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing
chiefly to the presence of this element in the standard of living that
J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all
the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
human being." The accepted standard of expenditure in the community
or in the class to which a person belongs largely determines what his
standard of living will be. It does this directly by commending
itself to his common sense as right and good, through his habitually
contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which it
belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence
on conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of
propriety, under pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and
practice the standard of living which is in vogue is both agreeable
and expedient, commonly to the point of being indispensable to personal
comfort and to success in life. The standard of living of any class, so
far as concerns the element of conspicuous waste, is commonly as high as
the earning capacity of the class will permit--with a constant tendency
to go higher. The effect upon the serious activities of men is therefore
to direct them with great singleness of purpose to the largest possible
acquisition of wealth, and to discountenance work that brings no
pecuniary gain. At the same time the effect on consumption is to
concentrate it upon the lines which are most patent to the observers
whose good opinion is sought; while the inclinations and aptitudes whose
exercise does not involve a honorific expenditure of time or substance
tend to fall into abeyance through disuse.

Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it has come
about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as
compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is
carried on before the eyes of observers. As a secondary consequence of
the same discrimination, people habitually screen their private life
from observation. So far as concerns that portion of their consumption
that may without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all
contact with their neighbors, hence the exclusiveness of people, as
regards their domestic life, in most of the industrially developed
communities; and hence, by remoter derivation, the habit of privacy and
reserve that is so large a feature in the code of proprieties of the
better class in all communities. The low birthrate of the classes upon
whom the requirements of reputable expenditure fall with great urgency
is likewise traceable to the exigencies of a standard of living based
on conspicuous waste. The conspicuous consumption, and the consequent
increased expense, required in the reputable maintenance of a child is
very considerable and acts as a powerful deterrent. It is probably the
most effectual of the Malthusian prudential checks.

The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of
retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical
comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children,
is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly
pursuits. Because of a presumed superiority and scarcity of the gifts
and attainments that characterize their life, these classes are by
convention subsumed under a higher social grade than their pecuniary
grade should warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case
is pitched correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an
exceptionally narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By
force of circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right
in these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in the
way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively high--as
measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and earning capacity of the
class, relatively to the non-scholarly classes whose social equals
they nominally are. In any modern community where there is no priestly
monopoly of these occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are
unavoidably thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among these
superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes with but
little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence there is no class
of the community that spends a larger proportion of its substance in
conspicuous waste than these.




Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste

The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which
the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live
up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of
goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and
effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is
present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of
observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is
observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree
become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,
some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus
designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful
articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to
the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but
do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for
the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.

Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of
which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and
wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time
and effort. This growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect
upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon
conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to
the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the
habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions
also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the
substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does
not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of
reputability.

The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.
In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which
do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but
which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some
magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,
influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,
the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense
of truth.

It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular
points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of
honorific expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct.
The matter is one which has received large attention and illustration at
the hands of those whose office it is to watch and admonish with
respect to any departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern
communities, where the dominant economic and legal feature of the
community's life is the institution of private property, one of the
salient features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate is
traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of the good
repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption. Most offenses
against property, especially offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come
under this head. It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword
that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the
offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme
obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the
naive moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of
escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good repute accrues
to him from his increased wealth and from his spending the irregularly
acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A well-bred expenditure of his
booty especially appeals with great effect to persons of a cultivated
sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral
turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted
also--and it is more immediately to the point--that we are all inclined
to condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose motive
is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent" manner of
life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has been
"nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional
extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such
an offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's
wife to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time
and substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In
such a case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous
waste traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the
extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain.
This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable
predatory or piratical element.

This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not
be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters
about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological
precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should
be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily
for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous
consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit
or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate
chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and
adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That
topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this
usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes
as to what is right and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing
of the principle of conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace
devout observances and conceits may therefore be pointed out.

Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great
portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the
consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same
class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is imputed a
predilection for temples not built with hands, the sacred buildings and
the other properties of the cult are constructed and decorated with some
view to a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but
little either of observation or introspection--and either will serve the
turn--to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship
has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's
frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon
the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or
squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories
of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This
requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard
to these accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability. It
may also be in place to notice that in all communities, especially in
neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary decency for dwellings
is not high, the local sanctuary is more ornate, more conspicuously
wasteful in its architecture and decoration, than the dwelling houses
of the congregation. This is true of nearly all denominations and cults,
whether Christian or Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of
the older and maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly
contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the members.
Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the physical well-being
of the members to but a slight extent, as compared with their humbler
dwelling-houses; but it is felt by all men that a right and enlightened
sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good demands that in all
expenditure on the sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of
the worshipper should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort
is admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least
scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity. In the
most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no expense is spared,
the principle of austerity is carried to the length of making the
fittings of the place a means of mortifying the flesh, especially in
appearance. There are few persons of delicate tastes, in the matter of
devout consumption to whom this austerely wasteful discomfort does not
appeal as intrinsically right and good. Devout consumption is of the
nature of vicarious consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based
on the pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,
backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should conspicuously
not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious consumer.

The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity in all
the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the sanctuary pertains
is not conceived to be present and make personal use of the property for
the gratification of luxurious tastes imputed to him. The character of
the sacred paraphernalia is somewhat different in this respect in those
cults where the habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly
approach those of an earthly patriarchal potentate--where he is
conceived to make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter
case the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given to
goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal master or
owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is simply employed
in the divinity's service, that is to say, where it is consumed
vicariously on his account by his servants, there the sacred properties
take the character suited to goods that are destined for vicarious
consumption only.

In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so
contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of the
vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the impression that
the end of their consumption is the consumer's comfort. For the end of
vicarious consumption is to enhance, not the fullness of life of the
consumer, but the pecuniary repute of the master for whose behoof the
consumption takes place. Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously
expensive, ornate, and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly
servitor of the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity
of consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it is
felt that they should be.

It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent expensiveness
that the principle of waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual
serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on
vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor
at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with
suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees
of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the
priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious
consumption of time are visible.

The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly present in
the exterior details of devout observances and need only be pointed out
in order to become obvious to all beholders. All ritual has a notable
tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas. This development
of formula is most noticeable in the maturer cults, which have at the
same time a more austere, ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but
it is perceptible also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer
and fresher sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the term
"service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in question)
grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and consistency, and
this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very pleasing to the correct
devout taste. And with a good reason, for the fact of its being
perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the master for whom it is
performed is exalted above the vulgar need of actually proficuous
service on the part of his servants. They are unprofitable servants, and
there is an honorific implication for their master in their remaining
unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at this
point between the priestly office and the office of the footman. It is
pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these matters, in either
case, to recognize in the obvious perfunctoriness of the service that it
is a pro forma execution only. There should be no show of agility or of
dexterous manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.

In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to the
divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these pecuniary
canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's habits of thought,
the principle of conspicuous waste has colored the worshippers' notions
of the divinity and of the relation in which the human subject stands
to him. It is of course in the more naive cults that this suffusion
of pecuniary beauty is most patent, but it is visible throughout. All
peoples, at whatever stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are
fain to eke out a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation regarding
the personality and habitual surroundings of their divinities. In so
calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill in their picture of the
divinity's presence and manner of life they habitually impute to him
such traits as go to make up their ideal of a worthy man. And in
seeking communion with the divinity the ways and means of approach are
assimilated as nearly as may be to the divine ideal that is in men's
minds at the time. It is felt that the divine presence is entered with
the best grace, and with the best effect, according to certain accepted
methods and with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances
which in popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine
nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and paraphernalia
adequate to such occasions of communion is, of course, to a good extent
shaped by the popular apprehension of what is intrinsically worthy
and beautiful in human carriage and surroundings on all occasions of
dignified intercourse. It would on this account be misleading to
attempt an analysis of devout demeanor by referring all evidences of
the presence of a pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and
baldly to the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also
be misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a
jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding and
condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because they are
under grade in the pecuniary respect.

And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons
of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect
our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions
of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine
communion. It is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene
and leisurely habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is
pictured in poetic imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout
fancy, the devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before
his auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of
opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of servitors. In
the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office
of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts
being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive
rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the
divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the
shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy
that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches
such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the
Negro population of the South. Their word-painters are unable to descend
to anything cheaper than gold; so that in this case the insistence on
pecuniary beauty gives a startling effect in yellow--such as would be
unbearable to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement the
ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of what is
right in the matter of sacred apparatus.

Similarly it is felt--and the sentiment is acted upon--that the priestly
servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive
work; that work of any kind--any employment which is of tangible human
use--must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the
precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should
come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel
or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion
with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by
any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious
leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of
men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance
and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the
canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately
or at the second remove.

These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching
and more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense
of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of
pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the
sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty.
Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being
conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in
proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.

The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon t

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