hich five thousand dollars can buy to-day, this standard
would be taken as a matter of course like fresh air and fresh water.
The same old dissatisfactions and discomforts would spring from the
human heart, when it looked with envy on the luxuries of the
ten-thousand-dollar men, or when by recklessness and foolishness or
illness the habitual home life became suddenly reduced to a pitiable
three-thousand-dollar standard, which would be the goal for the
workingmen of to-day. We are too little aware that the average
existence of the masses in earlier centuries was on a much narrower
scale than the life of practically the poorest to-day, and that the
mere material existence of those who to-day consider themselves as
industrial slaves is in many respects high above that of the
apprentices in the periods before the machine age. Even at present
those who think that they are at the bottom of material life in one
country often live much better than the multitudes in other lands in
which fewer desires have been aroused and developed.

The individual may often alternate between different standards, just
as any one of us when he goes out camping may feel perfectly happy
with the most moderate external conditions, which would appear to him
utter deprivation in the midst of his stylish life the year around.
Many an Irish servant girl feels that she cannot live here without her
own bathroom, and yet is perfectly satisfied when she goes home for
the summer and lives with seven in a room, not counting the pigs. This
dependence upon relative conditions must be the more complete the more
the income is used for external satisfactions. As far as the means
serve education and aesthetic enjoyment and inner culture, there
remains at least a certain parallelism between the amount of supply
and the enjoyment. But the average American of the five-thousand-dollar
class spends four thousand nine hundred dollars on goods of a different
order. Altogether his expenses are the house and the table, the
clothes of the women, and his runabout. In all these lines there is no
limit, and the house of to-day is no longer a pleasure if his
neighbour builds a bigger one to-morrow. The man with the
fifty-thousand-dollar expenditures feels the same dissatisfaction if
he cannot have the steam yacht and the picture gallery which the
multimillionaire enjoys.

The inner attitude, the temperament, the training, the adjustment of
desires to the available means, is th