erform, as well as to the society in which one
moves. Moreover, luxury is relative to individual abilities and individual
plans. It would be luxury for a farmer to go without a needed plow for the
sake of buying a lawn mower. It would be luxury for a student to own two
coats, if he must go without a dictionary to buy the second.

It is easy to settle the luxuries of others, but less easy to so define
luxury that the public can agree in the definition. In general, it is
described to be a meeting of fanciful rather than real wants. Any
individual in society is spending his wealth in luxury if he allows his
imagination to conjure up adornments of person or household which
contribute chiefly to display rather than to comfort or enlightenment. All
such adornments of person, or home, or the public streets, as cultivate
genuine taste and inspire to more of energy contribute to the general
welfare far more than mere expenditure for food can do. Yet in times of
starvation the food must come first. The world sometimes sneers at the
desire among very poor people to cultivate flowers and maintain a canary
or other pets; yet every philanthropist knows that these desires are among
the strongest incentives to greater thrift and keener exertion.

_Legal restrictions upon luxury._--With all this difficulty in definition
and the certainty of change from age to age, there is nevertheless a
disposition on the part of society to restrict actual luxury. Again and
again this has led to enactment of laws prohibiting expenditure in certain
definite forms. The dress of ladies of rank has been restricted as to
style and quantity of material and ways of making. The variety upon a
dinner table has been limited to a certain number of dishes and certain
kinds of food.

All of these have been egregious failures, from the impossibility of
measuring results upon the general progress of civilization. The indirect
effects of ingenuity in dress and cooking have been on the whole so
beneficial that the world cannot afford to hinder it. The intricacies of
French cooking seem to an ordinary household extreme luxury, yet that very
ingenuity has cheapened the cost of living, to a large portion of the
world, by rendering palatable the coarser vegetables and cheaper meats
which lie within the reach of the poor.

No real student of human nature would now attempt, unless it be in the
emergency of a great famine, to restrict expenditures by law upon the plea
of l