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.