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.