the same ground would have lent itself in hands not
guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even the better class of the
city's population view the progress of the work with an unreserved
approval which suggests that there is in this case little if any
discrepancy between the tastes of the upper and the lower or middle
classes of the city. The sense of beauty in the population of this
representative city of the advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of
any departure from its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.

The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of
taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance
of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem
incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of
planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily
wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a
farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and
immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the
farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm,
beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give
room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is
felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing
would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.

The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable
in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this
canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to
the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is
true of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable
degree industrially useful to the community--as, for instance, barnyard
fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the
nature of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different
with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end;
such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast
horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are
therefore honorific in their nature and may legiti