id to be a spiritual
rather than a mechanical function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate
system of good form, specifically regulating the manner in which this
vicarious leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much because it
evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows
an absence of the servile attitude and temperament, but because, in
the last analysis, it shows the absence of special training. Special
training in personal service costs time and effort, and where it is
obviously present in a high degree, it argues that the servant who
possesses it, neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any
productive occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
extending far back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not
only as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and skilful
workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance over those
whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has utility also as
putting in evidence a much larger consumption of human service than
would be shown by the mere present conspicuous leisure performed by an
untrained person. It is a serious grievance if a gentleman's butler or
footman performs his duties about his master's table or carriage in
such unformed style as to suggest that his habitual occupation may be
ploughing or sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on
the master's part to procure the service of specially trained servants;
that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the consumption
of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a trained servant for
special service under the exacting code of forms. If the performance of
the servant argues lack of means on the part of his master, it defeats
its chief substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the evidence
they afford of the master's ability to pay.

What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of an
under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of inexpensiveness or
of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case. The connection is much
less immediate. What happens here is what happens generally. Whatever
approves itself to us on any ground at the outset, presently comes to
appeal to us as a gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our
habits of though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
canon of