f the development,
the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most
obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost
its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's prepotence.

Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character of a
struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary
in economic theory, and especially among those economists who adhere
with least faltering to the body of modernised classical doctrines, to
construe this struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for
subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during
the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its
character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict
as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the
means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an advance is
presently made beyond this early stage of technological development.
Industrial efficiency is presently carried to such a pitch as to afford
something appreciably more than a bare livelihood to those engaged in
the industrial process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to
speak of the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as
a competition for an increase of the comforts of life,--primarily for
an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of goods
affords.

The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the
consumption of the goods accumulated--whether it is consumption directly
by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for
this purpose identified with him in theory. This is at least felt to
be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is
incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of
course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants--his
physical comfort--or his so-called higher wants--spiritual, aesthetic,
intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all
economic readers.

But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning
that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which
accumulation invariably proceeds. The