prescriptive usage has an immediate effect
upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon
conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to
the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the
habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions
also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the
substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does
not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of
reputability.

The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.
In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which
do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but
which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some
magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,
influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,
the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense
of truth.

It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular
points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of
honorific expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct.
The matter is one which has received large attention and illustration at
the hands of those whose office it is to watch and admonish with
respect to any departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern
communities, where the dominant economic and legal feature of the
community's life is the institution of private property, one of the
salient features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate is
traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of the good
repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption. Most offenses
against property, especially offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come
under this head. It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword
that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the
offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme
obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the
naive moral code alone.