ndard of
living of the working community is in fact made up of two
distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements
of decorously wasteful consumption--the "decencies of life." These
decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point
of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This
composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which
consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the
effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were
all of the nature of a physical subsistence minimum.

Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over,
after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of
consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the
rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will
find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and
only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred.
The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy
or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the
price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by
native propensity incline, e.g., to pursue the sciences or the fine
arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a
virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a
definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of the case under
the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point;
although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in
the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run
somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent
among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.

The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of
civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in
effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where
at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of
conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not
visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under
the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the
banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept
classes, the gentlefolk who alone would ha