working classes, reference has been made to a further
division of labour, -- that between the different servant
classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly those persons
whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a new,
subsidiary range of duties -- the vicarious consumption of goods.
The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in
the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants'
quarters. Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form
of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one,
is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by
the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment.

But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an
evidence of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or
less elaborate system. The beginning of a differentiation in
consumption even antedates the appearance of anything that can
fairly be called pecuniary strength. It is traceable back to the
initial phase of predatory culture, and there is even a
suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this respect lies
back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most primitive
differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in
that it is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the
latter it does not rest on a difference in accumulated wealth.
The utility of consumption as an evidence of wealth is to be
classed as a derivative growth. It is an adaption to a new end,
by a selective process, of a distinction previously existing and
well established in men's habits of thought.