concomitant progressive exemption of such servants from
productive labour. By virtue of their serving as evidence of
ability to pay, the office of such domestics regularly tends to
include continually fewer duties, and their service tends in the
end to become nominal only. This is especially true of those
servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in
great part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour
and in the evidence which this exemption affords of their
master's wealth and power.

After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred
above women for services that bring them obtrusively into view.
Men, especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and
other menials should be, are obviously more powerful and more
expensive than women. They are better fitted for this work, as
showing a larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it
comes about that in the economy of the leisure class the busy
housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her retinue of
hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady and
the lackey.

In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs
from the leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is
an occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form,
in large measure, of a painstaking attention to the service of
the master, or to the maintenance and elaboration of the