virtues. The
pecuniary struggle produces an underfed class, of large proportions.
This underfeeding consists in a deficiency of the necessaries of life or
of the necessaries of a decent expenditure. In either case the result is
a closely enforced struggle for the means with which to meet the daily
needs; whether it be the physical or the higher needs. The strain of
self-assertion against odds takes up the whole energy of the individual;
he bends his efforts to compass his own invidious ends alone, and
becomes continually more narrowly self-seeking. The industrial traits in
this way tend to obsolescence through disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by
imposing a scheme of pecuniary decency and by withdrawing as much as
may be of the means of life from the lower classes, the institution of
a leisure class acts to conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the
population. The result is an assimilation of the lower classes to the
type of human nature that belongs primarily to the upper classes only.
It appears, therefore, that there is no wide difference in temperament
between the upper and the lower classes; but it appears also that the
absence of such a difference is in good part due to the prescriptive
example of the leisure class and to the popular acceptance of those
broad principles of conspicuous waste and pecuniary emulation on which
the institution of a leisure class rests. The institution acts to lower
the industrial efficiency of the community and retard the adaptation of
human nature to the exigencies of modern industrial life. It affects the
prevalent or effective human nature in a conservative direction, (1) by
direct transmission of archaic traits, through inheritance within the
class and wherever the leisure-class blood is transfused outside the
class, and (2) by conserving and fortifying the traditions of the
archaic regime, and so making the chances of survival of barbarian
traits greater also outside the range of transfusion of leisure-class
blood.

But little if anything has been done towards collecting or digesting
data that are of special significance for the question of survival or
elimination of traits in the modern populations. Little of a tangible
character can therefore be offered in support of the view here taken,
beyond a discursive review of such everyday facts as lie ready to hand.
Such a recital can scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for
all that it seems necessary to the completene