st ostentatious expenditure on the ground of the employment it gives
and of other incidental advantages it is supposed to produce. But
nothing in political economy is more certain than that the vast and
ever-increasing expenditure on the luxury of ostentation in modern
societies, by withdrawing great masses of capital from productive
labour, is a grave economical evil, and there is probably no other form
of expenditure which, in proportion to its amount, gives so little real
pleasure and confers so little real good. Its evil in setting up
material and base standards of excellence, in stimulating the worst
passions that grow out of an immoderate love of wealth, in ruining many
who are tempted into a competition which they are unable to support, can
hardly be overrated. It is felt in every rank in raising the standard of
conventional expenses, excluding from much social intercourse many who
are admirably fitted to adorn it, and introducing into all society a
lower and more material tone. Nor are these its only consequences.
Wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts,
or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to
their cost, will never excite serious indignation. It is the colossal
waste of the means of human happiness in the most selfish and most
vulgar forms of social advertisement and competition that gives a force
and almost a justification to anarchical passions which menace the
whole future of our civilisation. It is such things that stimulate class
hatreds and deepen class divisions, and if the law of opinion does not
interfere to check them they will one day bring down upon the society
that encourages them a signal and well-merited retribution.

A more recognised, though probably not really more pernicious example of
false ideals, is to be found in the glorification of the _demi-monde_,
which is so conspicuous in some societies and literatures. In a healthy
state of opinion, the public, ostentatious appearance of such persons,
without any concealment of their character, in the great concourse of
fashion and among the notabilities of the State, would appear an
intolerable scandal, and it becomes much worse when they give the tone
to fashion and become the centres and the models of large and by no
means undistinguished sections of Society. The evils springing from this
public glorification of the class are immeasurably greater than the
evils arising from its existence.