plendor and fashionable magnificence will abundantly substantiate.
There is a constant proclivity to advance this conventional "standard of
living" to the limit set by the available means; and yet these
conventional necessities will ordinarily not, in the aggregate, take up
all the available means; although now and again, as under the _Ancien
Regime_, and perhaps in Imperial Rome, the standard of splendid living
may also exceed the current means in hand and lead to impoverishment of
the underlying community.

An analysis of the circumstances governing this flexibility of the
conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be
gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left
as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which
the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the
underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil
service, therefore, would be a matter of estimate, on which no close
agreement would be expected; and yet, here as in an earlier connection,
it seems a reasonable expectation that sufficient dignity and
magnificence could be put in evidence by such a large-scale
establishment at a lower aggregate cost than the aggregate of
expenditures previously incurred for the like ends by various nations
working in severalty and at cross purposes.

Doubtless it would be altogether a mistaken view of this production of
dignity by means of a lavish expenditure on superfluities, to believe
that the same principle of economy should apply here as was found
applicable in the matter of armament for defense. With the installation
of a collective national establishment, to include substantially all the
previously competing nations, the need of defensive armament should in
all reason decline to something very inconsiderable indeed. But it would
be hasty to conclude that with the coalescence of these nations under
one paramount control the need of creating notoriety and prestige for
this resulting central establishment by the consumption of decorative
superfluities would likewise decline. The need of such dignity and
magnificence is only in part, perhaps a minor part, of a defensive
character. For the greater part, no doubt, the motive to this
conspicuously wasteful consumption is personal vanity, in Imperial
policy as well as in the private life of fashion,--or perhaps one should
more deferentially say that it is a certain rang