can never become so
favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate
himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for
pecuniary reputability.

In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the
average or general desire for wealth is out of the question. However
widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general
increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating
this need, the ground of which approach to satiating this need, the
ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in
the accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to
accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort,
then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be
satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but
since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis
of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is
possible.

What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no
other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to
excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of one's
fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and security from want is
present as a motive at every stage of the process of accumulation in
a modern industrial community; although the standard of sufficiency in
these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary
emulation. To a great extent this emulation shapes the methods and
selects the objects of expenditure for personal comfort and decent
livelihood.

Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of
his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the
naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed
and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with
which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage,
where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this
propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his
scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
futility remain the underlying econom