be
expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of
this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.

But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and
civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation
of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the
community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of
gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do
the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the
subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective
posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as
a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed
in less eloquent words, it appears to comprise elements that should
make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the
statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no
avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised
regime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands
over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held
inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive
spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative
instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to
quiet all doubts.

Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will
not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this
scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted
wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not
be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of
superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They
would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance
of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and
most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam
Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the
purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed
redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree,--dependent in
fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the
legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose
duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive,