of leisure can live in manifest ease and comfort. At this stage
wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the benefits accruing from
the possession of riches and power take the form chiefly of
personal service and the immediate products of personal service.
Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the
conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since
application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and
subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in
the community. Habits of industry and thrift, therefore, are not
uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. On the
contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances
participation in productive labour. Labour would unavoidably
become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under the
ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive
effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men, and
this tradition is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage
from the predatory to the quasi-peaceable manner of life.

Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with
the first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the
dishonour attaching to productive employment, it would in any
case have come in as one of the early consequences of ownership.
And it is to be remarked that while the leisure class existed in
theory from the beginning of predatory culture, the institution
takes on a new and fuller meaning with the transition from the
predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary stage of culture. It
is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact as well as in
theory. From this point dates the institution of the leisure