riousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on
leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established
laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this
conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought
as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling;
while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making
labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally
impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy
life.

This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density
and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the
constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in
scope and consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to
accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency,
acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high minded and
impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or privation.
Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to
work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a
sense spurious, leisure class--abjectly poor and living in a precarious
life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful
pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days
are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense
of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all
civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary
culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been
habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual
labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even
set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with
their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in
part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person.
The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and
so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the
tabu is itself a derivative of the