The thief or swindler who has gained great
wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of
escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good repute accrues
to him from his increased wealth and from his spending the irregularly
acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A well-bred expenditure of his
booty especially appeals with great effect to persons of a cultivated
sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral
turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted
also--and it is more immediately to the point--that we are all inclined
to condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose motive
is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent" manner of
life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has been
"nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional
extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such
an offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's
wife to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time
and substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In
such a case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous
waste traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the
extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain.
This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable
predatory or piratical element.

This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not
be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters
about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological
precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should
be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily
for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous
consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit
or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate
chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and
adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That
topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this
usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes
as to what is right and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing
of the principle of conspicuous waste upon some of the com