e drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous
application becomes the accredited employment of the women of the
well-to-do classes, the prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary
decency, which requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their
part, will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is especially true
during the earlier phases of the pecuniary culture, while the leisure
of the leisure class is still in great measure a predatory activity, an
active assertion of mastery in which there is enough of tangible
purpose of an invidious kind to admit of its being taken seriously as an
employment to which one may without shame put one's hand. This condition
of things has obviously lasted well down into the present in some
communities. It continues to hold to a different extent for different
individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status and with
the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which the individual
is endowed. But where the economic structure of the community has so
far outgrown the scheme of life based on status that the relation of
personal subservience is no longer felt to be the sole "natural" human
relation; there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin
to assert itself in the less conformable individuals against the more
recent, relatively superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views
which the predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their coercive
force for the community or the class in question so soon as the habit of
mind and the views of life due to the predatory and the quasi-peaceable
discipline cease to be in fairly close accord with the later-developed
economic situation. This is evident in the case of the industrious
classes of modern communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life
has lost much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the upper
classes, though not in the same manner.

The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture are
relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying propensities and
mental characteristics of the race; which it owes to the protracted
discipline of the earlier, proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable,
relatively undifferentiated economic life