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