ntiments 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 di