whose ordinary means of acquiring goods is productive labour.
This is more especially true of the labouring classes in a
sedentary community which is at an agricultural stage of
industry, in which there is a considerable subdivision of
industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these classes a
more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the
imputation of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them,
at least not within their class. Rather, since labour is their
recognised and accepted mode of life, they take some emulative
pride in a reputation for efficiency in their work, this being
often the only line of emulation that is open to them. For those
for whom acquisition and emulation is possible only within the
field of productive efficiency and thrift, the struggle for
pecuniary reputability will in some measure work out in an
increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain secondary
features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of, come in
to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among
the superior class.

But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which
we are here immediately concerned. For this class also the
incentive to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action
is so greatly qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary
emulation, that any inclination in this direction is practically
overborne and any incentive to diligence tends to be of no
effect. The most imperative of these secondary demands of
emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is the requirement
of abstention from productive work. This is true in an especial