may be cited carpets and tapestries, silver table
service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched linen, many articles
of jewelry and of dress. The indispensability of these things after the
habit and the convention have been formed, however, has little to say
in the classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure must
be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the question whether it
serves directly to enhance human life on the whole-whether it furthers
the life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of
the instinct of workmanship, and that instinct is the court of final
appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a question
as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question
is, therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces to the
particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but whether,
aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and conventional
decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or in the fullness of life.
Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far
as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making
an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it
could not have become customary and prescriptive without the backing of
this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure should
be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of
conspicuous waste. An article may be useful and wasteful both, and its
utility to the consumer may be made up of use and waste in the most
varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of
their utility; although, in a general way, the element of waste tends
to predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of
articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible
to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose;
and on the other hand, even in special machinery and tools contrived for
some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances
of human industry, the trace