is the institution of private property, one of the salient
features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate
is traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of
the good repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption.
Most offenses against property, especially offenses of an
appreciable magnitude, come under this head. It is also a matter
of common notoriety and byword that in offenses which result in a
large accession of property to the offender he does not
ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme obloquy with
which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the naive
moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small
thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good
repute accrues to him from his increased wealth and from his
spending the irregularly acquired possessions in a seemly manner.
A well-bred expenditure of his booty especially appeals with
great effect to persons of a cultivated sense of the proprieties,
and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral turpitude with which
his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted also -- and it
is more immediately to the point -- that we are all inclined to
condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose
motive is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent"
manner of life for his wife and children. If it is added that the
wife has been "nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted
as an additional extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are
prone to condone such an offense where its aim is the honorific
one of enabling the offender's wife to perform for him such an
amount of vicarious consumption of time and substance as is