be seen, for
instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work,
in various articles of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly
apparel.

The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty"
due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty,
in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a
congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under
the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.

This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the development of
architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized
residence or public building which can claim anything better than
relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the
elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of
fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses
in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty,
the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left untouched
by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the
building.

What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon
the canons of taste will hold true, with but a slight change of terms,
of its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for
other ends than the aesthetic one. Goods are produced and consumed as a
means to the fuller unfolding of human life; and their utility consists,
in the first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end
is, in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual, taken
in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon
the consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has
thereby invested constable goods with a secondary utility as evidence
of relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable
goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also
to the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which
contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to
give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical p