ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an especial degree to the
occupations which are associated in our habits of thought with
menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a
spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings,
mean (that is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly
productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided.
They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane
__ with "high thinking". From the days of the Greek philosophers
to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact
with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday
purposes of human life has ever been recognised by thoughtful men
as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless,
human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure
is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences
of wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It
is in part a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of
gaining the respect of others, and in part it is the result of a
mental substitution. The performance of labour has been accepted
as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes
itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically
base.

During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the
earlier stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry
that follows the predatory stage, a life of leisure is the
readiest and most conclusive evidence of pecuniary strength, and
therefore of superior force; provided always that the gentleman