Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/847

 REVIEWS 831

Nearly all the treatment we find of such highly complex subjects is viti- ated by the perpetual mixing up of the fields of inquiry, until all is muddle and Wirrwarr. Here for once we have a single subject clearly handled and consistently adhered to, at the risk even of giving offense to those whose suggestibility is so strong that they cannot keep other subjects out of view.

It may be said that the author ought at least to have shown how this very leisure class, and solely by virtue of its leisure, has made the greater part certainly of the earlier scientific discoveries, and worked out some of the most important problems ; that even modern science owes as much to this class as to all other classes combined, as shown by de CandoUe in his Histoire des Sciences et des Savants; that all the important "institutions," including the learned professions and the sciences, have, as Spencer has shown, developed out of "ecclesiastical institutions," and owe their existence and advanced modern character to that typical "leisure class," the priesthood, given over to "vicarious leisure " and " devout observances ; " that no class and no human being, as the labor reformers so justly insist, can do any high intellectual work, or even cultivate the mind, without a certain amount of leisure and respite from incessant toil. Our author might, it would seem to some, have at least dwelt upon these well-known and universally admitted facts relating directly to the leisure class. But, in the first place, he is not engaged in explaining the intellectual and moral progress of the world, and, in the second place, these facts are too well known to need restatement, and he seems to have no taste for hack- neyed topics. Such facts are not opposed to anything he says, but are simply also true. They are patent, while what he tells us is latent, and he chose between the two classes of subjects, telling us a good many things that we did not know before instead of telling us so much that we did know. In the third place, and principally, his point of view is strictly economic, and he deals with a subject within his own specialty, and has not seen fit to branch out into wider fields, as economic writers are so much in the habit of doing. Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

In a word, our author is dealing with the question of wealth, and his whole treatise is confined to the "pecuniary" aspect. He finds that everything has a pecuniary value, which has little to do with its intrinsic or rational value ; that this pecuniary value has grown out of a long series of events in human history leading back to the age of barbarism. It is a typical case of conventional ideas as distinguished from rational ideas. It can only be made to seem rational when we