than for service actually performed. In so far as they are not kept for
exhibition simply, they afford gratification to their master chiefly in
allowing scope to his propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of
the continually increasing household apparatus may require added labour;
but since the apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as
a means of good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this
qualification is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are
better served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation and
multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a concomitant
progressive exemption of such servants from productive labour. By virtue
of their serving as evidence of ability to pay, the office of such
domestics regularly tends to include continually fewer duties, and their
service tends in the end to become nominal only. This is especially true
of those servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in great
part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in
the evidence which this exemption affords of their master's wealth and
power.

After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above
women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men,
especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other menials
should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive than women.
They are better fitted for this work, as showing a larger waste of time
and of human energy. Hence it comes about that in the economy of the
leisure class the busy housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her
retinue of hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady
and the lackey.

In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from the
leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an occupation of
an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in large measure, of
a painstaking attention to the service of the master, or to the
maintenance and elaboration of the household paraphernalia; so that
it is leisure only in the sense that little or no productive work is
p