effective means of advertisement, relative to the environment in
which he is placed, than are the savings of the people living on
farms and in the small villages. Among the latter, everybody's
affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status, are known to
everybody else. Considered by itself simply -- taken in the first
degree -- this added provocation to which the artisan and the
urban laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously
decrease the amount of savings; but in its cumulative action,
through raising the standard of decent expenditure, its deterrent
effect on the tendency to save cannot but be very great.

A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and
among the lower middle class of the urban population generally
Journeymen printers may be named as a class among whom this form
of conspicuous consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it
carries with it certain well-marked consequences that are often
deprecated. The peculiar habits of the class in this respect are
commonly set down to some kind of an ill-defined moral deficiency
with which this class is credited, or to a morally deleterious
influence which their occupation is supposed to exert, in some
unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of
the case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms
of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned
to account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the
inertia due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation
requires more than the average of intelligence and general