mong 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 se