menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the
livery comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something
of a honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes obnoxious
to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed
from a state of effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the
sting of any imputation of servility. This antipathy asserts itself
even in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations
prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country
the aversion even goes the length of discrediting--in a mild and
uncertain way--those government employments, military and civil, which
require the wearing of a livery or uniform.

With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers
attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like
is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number
of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general way,
though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The
dependent who was first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the
chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the later development of
the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last.
In the higher grades of society a large volume of both these kinds of
service is required; and here the wife is of course still assisted in
the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials. But as we descend
the social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of
vicarious leisure and consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the
communities of the Western culture, this point is at present found among
the lower middle class.

And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance
that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the
part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it
has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the
business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and
its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial
community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of
the household-disappears at a relat