fice of the leisure class in guiding this growth as well as
in retarding it; but little can be said here of its relation to
institutional growth except as it touches the institutions that
are primarily and immediately of an economic character. These
institutions--the economic structure--may be roughly distinguished into
two classes or categories, according as they serve one or the other of
two divergent purposes of economic life.

To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of acquisition
or of production; or to revert to terms already employed in a different
connection in earlier chapters, they are pecuniary or industrial
institutions; or in still other terms, they are institutions serving
either the invidious or the non-invidious economic interest. The former
category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking
the latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not
often recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the
subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive
attention they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business
side; that being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly
occupies men's deliberations in our time, especially the deliberations
of the upper classes. These classes have little else than a business
interest in things economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly
incumbent to deliberate upon the community's affairs.

The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation--a relation of
acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability.
Indirectly their economic office may, of course, be of the utmost
importance to the economic life process; and it is by no means here
intended to depreciate the economic function of the propertied class or
of the captains of industry. The purpose is simply to point out what is
the nature of the relation of these classes to the industrial process
and to economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their own
use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the
business world have grown up under the selective surveillance of this
principle of predation or parasitism. They are conventions of ownership;
derivatives, more