go to physical comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity
or absence of children, is perhaps seen at its best among the
classes given to scholarly pursuits. Because of a presumed
superiority and scarcity of the gifts and attainments that
characterize their life, these classes are by convention subsumed
under a higher social grade than their pecuniary grade should
warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case is pitched
correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an exceptionally
narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By force of
circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right in
these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in
the way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively
high -- as measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and
earning capacity of the class, relatively to the non-scholarly
classes whose social equals they nominally are. In any modern
community where there is no priestly monopoly of these
occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are unavoidably
thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among
these superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes
with but little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence
there is no class of the community that spends a larger
proportion of its substance in conspicuous waste than these.




Chapter Six

Pecuniary Canons of Taste