is importance alive and alert, but it is of
scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency.
In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is
comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and
by exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his habitual
standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind
and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be a slight upon his
human dignity, even apart from all conscious consideration of the
approval or disapproval of his fellows.

The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable
in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force
even today. So much so that there are few of the better class who are no
possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour.
We have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an
especial degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of
thought with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste
that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that
is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations
are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with
life on a satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the
days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and
of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the
immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised by
thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a
blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of
leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of
wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in part
a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the respect
of others, and in part it is the result of a mental substitution. The
performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of
inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be
regarded as intrinsically base.

During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows the
predatory stage,