economic or industrial relation
simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under the patronage
performs the duties of a learned life vicariously for his patron, to
whom a certain repute inures after the manner of the good repute imputed
to a master for whom any form of vicarious leisure is performed. It is
also to be noted that, in point of historical fact, the furtherance of
learning or the maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas
relation has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in
classical lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.

Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of the
leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of reputable
living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks expression among
the class on the side of classical and formal erudition, rather than
on the side of the sciences that bear some relation to the community's
industrial life. The most frequent excursions into other than classical
fields of knowledge on the part of members of the leisure class are made
into the discipline of law and the political, and more especially the
administrative, sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially
bodies of maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office
of government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest with
which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the
intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical
interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the
members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of
government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic
leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion
over the population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it its
content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart from all
questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and so long as
the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a
proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as
the tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has
lasted on into the later life of those modern communities for whom
proprietary government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass