The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is
a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective
adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of
natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is
being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down,
broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to
a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which
has progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the
changing institutions under which men have lived. Institutions are not
only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which
shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and
aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and of
human relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of
selection. So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a
further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament,
and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the
changing environment through the formation of new institutions.
The forces which have shaped the development of human life and of social
structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of living tissue
and material environment; but proximately for the purpose in hand, these
forces may best be stated in terms of an environment, partly human,
partly non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definite
physical and intellectual constitution. Taken in the aggregate or
average, this human subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt,
under a rule of selective conservation of favorable variations.
The selection of favorable variations is perhaps in great measure a
selective conservation of ethnic types. In the life history of any
community whose population is made up of a mixture of divers ethnic
elements, one or another of several persistent and relatively stable
types of body and of temperament rises into dominance at any given
point. The situation, including the institutions in force at any given
time, will favor the survival and dominance of one type of character in
preference to another; and the type of man so selected to continue and
to further elaborate the institutions handed down from the past will in
some considerable measure shape these institutions in his own likeness.
But apart from selection as between relatively stable types of character
and habits of mind, there is no doubt simultaneously going on a process
of selective adaptation of habits of thought within the general range of
aptitudes which is characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or types.
There may be a variation in the fundamental character of any population
by selection between relatively stable types; but there is also a
variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the type, and
to selection between specific habitual views regarding any given social
relation or group of relations.
For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature of the
adaptive process--whether it is chiefly a selection between stable types
of temperament and character, or chiefly an adaptation of men's habits
of thought to changing circumstances--is of less importance than the
fact that, by one method or another, institutions change and develop.
Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are
of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli
which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular
relations and particular functions of the individual and of the
community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate
of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the
development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly
characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of
life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory
of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type
of character.
The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through
a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view
of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental
attitude handed down from the past. The institutions--that is to say the
habits of thought--under the guidance of which men live are in this way
received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in
any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past
circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the
requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of
selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing
situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for
the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the
adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each
successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence
as soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has
been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new
step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the
institutions of today--the present accepted scheme of life--do not
entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men's present
habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances
enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down,
these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes,
or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social
structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only
through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the
community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of
thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of
society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part
of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer
tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different
set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not
be a question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is
a process of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a
process of individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.
Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of economic
theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to an approximately
exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer relations", but this
adjustment is never definitively established, since the "outer
relations" are subject to constant change as a consequence of the
progressive change going on in the "inner relations." But the degree
of approximation may be greater or less, depending on the facility with
which an adjustment is made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought
to conform with the exigencies of an altered situation is in any case
made only tardily and reluctantly, and only under the coercion exercised
by a stipulation which has made the accredited views untenable.
The readjustment of institutions and habitual views to an altered
environment is made in response to pressure from without; it is of the
nature of a response to stimulus. Freedom and facility of readjustment,
that is to say capacity for growth in social structure, therefore
depends in great measure on the degree of freedom with which the
situation at any given time acts on the individual members of the
community-the degree of exposure of the individual members to the
constraining forces of the environment. If any portion or class of
society is sheltered from the action of the environment in any essential
respect, that portion of the community, or that class, will adapt
its views and its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general
situation; it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered
position with respect to the economic forces that make for change
and readjustment. And it may be said that the forces which make for
a readjustment of institutions, especially in the case of a modern
industrial community, are, in the last analysis, almost entirely of an
economic nature.
Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism,
the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic
institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the
life process of the community in contact with the material environment
in which it lives. When given methods of unfolding human activity in
this given environment have been elaborated in this way, the life of
the community will express itself with some facility in these habitual
directions. The community will make use of the forces of the environment
for the purposes of its life according to methods learned in the past
and embodied in these institutions. But as population increases, and as
men's knowledge and skill in directing the forces of nature widen, the
habitual methods of relation between the members of the group, and the
habitual method of carrying on the life process of the group as a
whole, no longer give the same result as before; nor are the resulting
conditions of life distributed and apportioned in the same manner or
with the same effect among the various members as before. If the scheme
according to which the life process of the group was carried on under
the earlier conditions gave approximately the highest attainable
result--under the circumstances--in the way of efficiency or facility
of the life process of the group; then the same scheme of life unaltered
will not yield the highest result attainable in this respect under the
altered conditions. Under the altered conditions of population, skill,
and knowledge, the facility of life as carried on according to the
traditional scheme may not be lower than under the earlier conditions;
but the chances are always that it is less than might be if the scheme
were altered to suit the altered conditions.
The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the life
of individuals carried on in at least ostensible severalty. The group's
accepted scheme of life is the consensus of views held by the body of
these individuals as to what is right, good, expedient, and beautiful in
the way of human life. In the redistribution of the conditions of life
that comes of the altered method of dealing with the environment, the
outcome is not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life for
the group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually result in a
decrease of facility or fullness of life for some members of the
group. An advance in technical methods, in population, or in industrial
organization will require at least some of the members of the community
to change their habits of life, if they are to enter with facility and
effect into the altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be
unable to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and
beautiful habits of life.
Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual
relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the
method of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and
the traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed. It is the
individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to
reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded
to accept new standards; and it is through the need of the means of
livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted
by the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in
the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact--that
external forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary
or economic exigencies--it is owing to this fact that we can say that
the forces which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any
modern industrial community are chiefly economic forces; or more
specifically, these forces take the form of pecuniary pressure. Such a
readjustment as is here contemplated is substantially a change in men's
views as to what is good and right, and the means through which a change
is wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in large
part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human life
make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this true of any
change in the direction of what is called progress; that is to say, in
the direction of divergence from the archaic position--from the position
which may be accounted the point of departure at any step in the social
evolution of the community. Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to
which the race has been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is
especially true in case the development away from this past standpoint
has not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which
lies immediately back of the present in the life history of Western
civilization is what has here been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At
this quasi-peaceable stage the law of status is the dominant feature in
the scheme of life. There is no need of pointing out how prone the
men of today are to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of
personal subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic exigencies of
today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a habit of mind that
is in full accord with these later-developed exigencies. The predatory
and quasi-peaceable stages of economic evolution seem to have been of
long duration in life history of all the chief ethnic elements which go
to make up the populations of the Western culture. The temperament
and the propensities proper to those cultural stages have, therefore,
attained such a persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad
features of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in
the case of any class or community which is removed from the action of
those forces that make for a maintenance of the later-developed habits
of thought.
It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or even
considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher industrial
culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment, or to an economic
situation of a more primitive character, they quickly show evidence of
reversion toward the spiritual features which characterize the predatory
type; and it seems probable that the dolicho-blond type of European man
is possessed of a greater facility for such reversion to barbarism than
the other ethnic elements with which that type is associated in the
Western culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in
the later history of migration and colonization. Except for the fear
of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic
a feature of the predatory culture, and the presence of which is
frequently the most striking mark of reversion in modern communities,
the case of the American colonies might be cited as an example of such a
reversion on an unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of
very large scope.
The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of
those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized
industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means
of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a
consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one
of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands
which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a
readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is
the conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic situation
of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of
this class. They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change
their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world
to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they
are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community.
Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of
this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which
alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social
evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.
This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the
commonplaces of popular opinion.
The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any
theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the
cultural development. When an explanation of this class conservatism is
offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes
innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in
maintaining the present conditions. The explanation here put forward
imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in
the cultural scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
interested calculation of material advantages; it is an instinctive
revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking
at things--a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by
stress of circumstances. All change in habits of life and of thought
is irksome. The difference in this respect between the wealthy and the
common run of mankind lies not so much in the motive which prompts to
conservatism as in the degree of exposure to the economic forces that
urge a change. The members of the wealthy class do not yield to the
demand for innovation as readily as other men because they are not
constrained to do so.
This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that
it has even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since
conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more
reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific
or decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that
an adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in
our notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all
who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism,
being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely,
innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. The first and
most unreflected element in that instinctive revulsion and reprobation
with which we turn from all social innovators is this sense of the
essential vulgarity of the thing. So that even in cases where one
recognizes the substantial merits of the case for which the innovator
is spokesman--as may easily happen if the evils which he seeks to
remedy are sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal
contact--still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the innovator
is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be associated, and
from whose social contact one must shrink. Innovation is bad form.
The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure
class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for
the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative
influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people
to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the
avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding
influence upon social development far in excess of that which the
simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive
example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes
against any innovation, and to fix men's affections upon the good
institutions handed down from an earlier generation. There is a second
way in which the influence of the leisure class acts in the same
direction, so far as concerns hindrance to the adoption of a
conventional scheme of life more in accord with the exigencies of
the time. This second method of upper-class guidance is not in strict
consistency to be brought under the same category as the instinctive
conservatism and aversion to new modes of thought just spoken of; but
it may as well be dealt with here, since it has at least this much
in common with the conservative habit of mind that it acts to retard
innovation and the growth of social structure. The code of proprieties,
conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time and among any
given people has more or less of the character of an organic whole;
so that any appreciable change in one point of the scheme involves
something of a change or readjustment at other points also, if not
a reorganization all along the line. When a change is made which
immediately touches only a minor point in the scheme, the consequent
derangement of the structure of conventionalities may be inconspicuous;
but even in such a case it is safe to say that some derangement of the
general scheme, more or less far-reaching, will follow. On the
other hand, when an attempted reform involves the suppression or
thorough-going remodelling of an institution of first-rate importance
in the conventional scheme, it is immediately felt that a serious
derangement of the entire scheme would result; it is felt that a
readjustment of the structure to the new form taken on by one of
its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if not a doubtful
process.
In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in any
one feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve, it is only
necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic family, or of
the agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private property, or of the
theistic faith, in any country of the Western civilization; or suppose
the suppression of ancestor worship in China, or of the caste system in
india, or of slavery in Africa, or the establishment of equality of the
sexes in Mohammedan countries. It needs no argument to show that the
derangement of the general structure of conventionalities in any of
these cases would be very considerable. In order to effect such an
innovation a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought
would be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation amounts to
a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.
The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from the
accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday experience. It
is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice
and admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the
far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from
such relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican
Church, an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages,
abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these
innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its
base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality,"
"make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc. These
various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole; but, at the
same time, like all overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense
of the gravity of the consequences which they are intended to describe.
The effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the simple
alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances for the
convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious a degree of
innovations of first-rate importance is true in a less degree of changes
of a smaller immediate importance. The aversion to change is in large
part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any
given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of
institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the
instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought,
even in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance. A
consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the solidarity of human
institutions, is that any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of
nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise
be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of
thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted
theory of life involves a degree of mental effort--a more or less
protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's bearings under
the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure
of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some
surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for
subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is hindered by
underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than
by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the
occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose
energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for
the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative
because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation
as it stands today.
From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class
acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them
as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their
consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point
as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and
adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the
upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of
the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable
degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle
to any innovation.
This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of wealth
is seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same result. As has
already been seen, the imperative example set by the upper class in
fixing the canons of reputability fosters the practice of conspicuous
consumption. The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the
main elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course
not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but
the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the
example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter
are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes
whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption
of goods considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the
disposable surplus left over after the more imperative physical
needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a
conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness
of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to
be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or
conspicuous boarding. The result is that the requirements of pecuniary
reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty subsistence minimum
available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to absorb
any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical
necessities of life have been provided for. The outcome of the whole is
a strengthening of the general conservative attitude of the community.
The institution of a leisure class hinders cultural development
immediately (1) by the inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through
its prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism, and
(3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution of wealth and
sustenance on which the institution itself rests. To this is to be added
that the leisure class has also a material interest in leaving things
as they are. Under the circumstances prevailing at any given time this
class is in a privileged position, and any departure from the existing
order may be expected to work to the detriment of the class rather than
the reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as influenced by its
class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough alone. This
interested motive comes in to supplement the strong instinctive bias of
the class, and so to render it even more consistently conservative than
it otherwise would be.
All this, of course, has nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and
vehicle of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The inhibition
which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse. Wether it is the one
or the other in any given case is a question of casuistry rather than of
general theory. There may be truth in the view (as a question of policy)
so often expressed by the spokesmen of the conservative element, that
without some such substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as
is offered by the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation
and experiment would hurry the community into untenable and intolerable
situations; the only possible result of which would be discontent and
disastrous reaction. All this, however, is beside the present argument.
But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to the
indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation, the leisure
class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that
adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or
development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed
up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural
selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever
is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong
for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the
nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or
less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which
prevailed at some point in the past development; and they are therefore
wrong by something more than the interval which separates the present
situation from that of the past. "Right" and "wrong" are of course here
used without conveying any rejection as to what ought or ought not to
be. They are applied simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary
standpoint, and are intended to designate compatibility or
incompatibility with the effective evolutionary process. The institution
of a leisure class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by
precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the
existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to
a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still
farther out of adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing
situation even than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come
down from the immediate past.
But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the good old
ways, it remains true that institutions change and develop. There is
a cumulative growth of customs and habits of thought; a selective
adaptation of conventions and methods of life. Something is to be said
of the office of the leisure class in guiding this growth as well as
in retarding it; but little can be said here of its relation to
institutional growth except as it touches the institutions that
are primarily and immediately of an economic character. These
institutions--the economic structure--may be roughly distinguished into
two classes or categories, according as they serve one or the other of
two divergent purposes of economic life.
To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of acquisition
or of production; or to revert to terms already employed in a different
connection in earlier chapters, they are pecuniary or industrial
institutions; or in still other terms, they are institutions serving
either the invidious or the non-invidious economic interest. The former
category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking
the latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not
often recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the
subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive
attention they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business
side; that being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly
occupies men's deliberations in our time, especially the deliberations
of the upper classes. These classes have little else than a business
interest in things economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly
incumbent to deliberate upon the community's affairs.
The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation--a relation of
acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability.
Indirectly their economic office may, of course, be of the utmost
importance to the economic life process; and it is by no means here
intended to depreciate the economic function of the propertied class or
of the captains of industry. The purpose is simply to point out what is
the nature of the relation of these classes to the industrial process
and to economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their own
use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the
business world have grown up under the selective surveillance of this
principle of predation or parasitism. They are conventions of ownership;
derivatives, more or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But
these pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of today,
for they have grown up under a past situation differing somewhat from
the present. Even for effectiveness in the pecuniary way, therefore,
they are not as apt as might be. The changed industrial life requires
changed methods of acquisition; and the pecuniary classes have some
interest in so adapting the pecuniary institutions as to give them the
best effect for acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain arises.
Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the leisure-class
guidance of institutional growth, answering to the pecuniary ends which
shape leisure-class economic life.
The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments
and conventions that make for security of property, enforcement of
contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of
such bearing are changes affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited
liability, banking and currency, coalitions of laborers or employers,
trusts and pools. The community's institutional furniture of this kind
is of immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion as
they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly these
conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence for the
industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the
institutional growth in this respect, the pecuniary classes, therefore,
serve a purpose of the most serious importance to the community, not
only in the conservation of the accepted social scheme, but also
in shaping the industrial process proper. The immediate end of this
pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater
facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects
far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct
of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with
less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and
complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in
everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous.
As fast as pecuniary transactions are reduced to routine, the captain
of industry can be dispensed with. This consummation, it is needless
to say, lies yet in the indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in
favor of the pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another
field, to substitute the "soulless" joint-stock corporation for the
captain, and so they make also for the dispensability, of the great
leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore, the bent
given to the growth of economic institutions by the leisure-class
influence is of very considerable industrial consequence.