ife to which they give
rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of
thought in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture
of life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of
pecuniary decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from
the industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
directions in which the impecunious members of the community habitually
put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more
particularly as regards the upper-class and upper-middle-class women
of advanced industrial communities, this inhibition goes so far as to
insist on withdrawal even from the emulative process of accumulation by
the quasi-predator methods of the pecuniary occupations.

The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by eliminating
the habit of invidious comparison in respect of efficiency, or even
of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the fact that members of the
leisure class, both men and women, are to some extent exempt from the
necessity of finding a livelihood in a competitive struggle with
their fellows, makes it possible for members of this class not only to
survive, but even, within bounds, to follow their bent in case they are
not gifted with the aptitudes which make for success in the competitive
struggle. That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not depend
on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those aptitudes are
therefore greater in the higher grades of the leisure class than in the
general aver