It disposes them to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The
instinct of workmanship is present in all men, and asserts itself
even under very adverse circumstances. So that however wasteful a
given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least have some
colorable excuse in the way of an ostensible purpose. The manner
in which, under special circumstances, the instinct eventuates in
a taste for exploit and an invidious discrimination between noble
and ignoble classes has been indicated in an earlier chapter. In
so far as it comes into conflict with the law of conspicuous
waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so much
in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously
futile. Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its
guidance touches chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent
violations of its requirements. It is only less promptly and with
less constraining force that it reaches such substantial
violations of its requirements as are appreciated only upon
reflection.

So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or
usually by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too
constantly and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow
the instinct of workmanship seriously to take effect in the
direction of industrial usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable
stage (with slavery and status) passes into the peaceable stage
of industry (with wage labor and cash payment) the instinct comes
more effectively into play. It then begins aggressively to shape
men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts itself at least
as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All extraneous
considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a vanishing