of
this qualification, that so long as the household subsists, even with a
divided head, this class of non-productive labour performed for the
sake of the household reputability must still be classed as vicarious
leisure, although in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure
performed for the quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as
formerly, for the proprietary head of the household.

Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption

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