Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/851

 REVIEWS 835

to say that this must be done irrespective of whether anything is pro- duced or not. All acquisition must be non-productive under pain of falling out of the leisure class.

No biologist can fail to observe parallels in the organic world to many of the facts set forth in this book. Space forbids their enumera- tion, but one can scarcely refrain from noting among nature's njany wasteful ways the phenomena of secondary sexual characters, typified by the antlers of the stag and the gaudy tail of the peacock. These may be compared to wasteful human fashions, such as are enumerated in the chapter on " Pecuniary Canons of Taste." The principal difference is that nature, in producing these useless and cumbersome organs, has really given them a high degree of intrinsic beauty, even as judged by human tastes, while the products of human fashion, based on the canon of "pecuniary beauty," or costliness, are useless impediments to activity without the slightest claim upon anv rational standard of taste.

The author's theory of why fashions change is ingenious, and must be largely true. The ugliness caused by their superfluous cost renders them intolerable to behold for any great length of time, so that a change is demanded by the aesthetic sense even of the leisure class ; but the new ones can be no better, because they, too, must have these marks of "reputable futility" and "conspicuous waste," that are necessarily offensive to taste, which is based on the instinct of work- manship. They must therefore also soon give way to others no better than they, and so on indefinitely. It is a perpetual conflict between pecuniary beauty and rational beauty, which are incompatible, but in which the former always prevails, and all the latter can do is to con- demn the product and compel the victor to bring on another.

The genesis of a great number of institutions, customs, practices, and beliefs is worked out in the book, and their barbaric origin clearly shown. It would be useless to attempt their enumeration here, and only a few of the most curious can be named, such as the exemption of women from labor (vicarious leisure) : inebriacy and dissipation ; costly and unaesthetic decoration; the non-punishment of crime when on a large scale ; religious ceremonial evolutions recalling the terpsichorean stage or dance ; the higher learning, or "classicism;" preference for inferior hand-made over superior machine-made goods ; love of archa- ism in general; the respectability of conservatism; the conservatism and degeneracy of the higher institutions of learning; patriotism, dueling, snobbery ; English saddles, walking sticks ; athletic sports, college fraternities, the "cap and gown," etc., etc.