an accustomed standard is the difficulty of breaking
a habit that has once been formed. The relative facility with which an
advance in the standard is made means that the life process is a process
of unfolding activity and that it will readily unfold in a new direction
whenever and wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But
when the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed outlet even
after a change has taken place in the environment whereby the external
resistance has appreciably risen. That heightened facility of expression
in a given direction which is called habit may offset a considerable
increase in the resistance offered by external circumstances to the
unfolding of life in the given direction. As between the various habits,
or habitual modes and directions of expression, which go to make up an
individual's standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in
point of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point
of the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a given
direction.

That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while men
are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any direction, they are
more reluctant to retrench in some directions than in others; so that
while any accustomed consumption is reluctantly given up, there are
certain lines of consumption which are given up with relatively extreme
reluctance. The articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer
clings with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is of
course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite and
invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand it may
be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite, aggregate of
consumption required for the maintenance of life. This minimum, it
may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in case of a progressive
retrenchment of expenditure. That is to say, in a general way, the
most ancient and ingrained of the habits which govern the individual's
life--those habits that touch his existence as an organism--are the
most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher
wants--later-formed habits of the individual or the race--in a somewhat
irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher
wants, as for instance