information, and the men employed in it are therefore ordinarily
more ready than many others to take advantage of any slight
variation in the demand for their labor from one place to
another. The inertia due to the home feeling is consequently also
slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are high enough
to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The result
is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable
body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with
new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established
are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none
the less for the time being. The human proclivity to ostentation,
reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to spend
freely in those directions which will best serve these needs.
Here as elsewhere prescription seizes upon the custom as soon as
it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard
of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the
point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
direction -- for there is no merit in simple spiritless
conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a
matter of course by everyone in the trade.

The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among
the average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in
some measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more
transient character of acquaintance and human contact in this
trade. But the substantial ground of this high requirement in
dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same
propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency
which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and