An eminent political economist, to whom I once confided my aversion
for such _butler's and lady's-maid's ideals of life_, admonished me
that although useless possessions, unenjoyable luxury, ostentation,
and so forth, undoubtedly represented a waste of the world's energies
and resources, they should nevertheless be tolerated, inasmuch as
constituting a great incentive to industry. People work, he said,
largely that they may be able to waste. If you repress wastefulness
you will diminish, by so much, the production of wealth by the
wasteful, by the luxurious and the vain....
This may be true. Habits of modesty and of sparingness might perhaps
deprive the world of as much wealth as they would save. But even
supposing this to be true, though the wealth of the world did not
immediately gain, there would always be the modesty and sparingness to
the good; virtues which, sooner or later, would be bound to make more
wealth exist or to make existing wealth _go a longer way_. Appealing
to higher motives, to good sense and good feeling and good taste, has
the advantage of saving the drawbacks of lower motives, which _are_
lower just because they have such drawbacks. You may get a man to do a
desirable thing from undesirable motives; but those undesirable
motives will induce him, the very next minute, to do some undesirable
thing. The wages of good feeling and good taste is the satisfaction
thereof. The wages of covetousness and vanity is the grabbing of
advantages and the humiliating of neighbours; and these make life
poorer, however much bread there may be to eat or money to spend. What
are called higher motives are merely those which expand individual
life into harmonious connection with the life of all men; what we call
lower motives bring us hopelessly back, by a series of vicious
circles, to the mere isolated, sterile egos. Sterile, I mean, in the
sense that the supply of happiness dwindles instead of increasing.