Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/840

 826 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Danube ; and the Barbarians were astonished at the price which they received in exchange for so useless a commodity. There was a considerable demand for Babylonian carpets and other manufactures of the East ; but the most important and unpopular branch of foreign trade was carried on with Arabia and India. 1

In commenting upon the effects of this luxurious living he says :

The effeminate luxury which infected the manners of courts and cities had instilled a secret and destructive poison into the camps of the legions ; and their degeneracy has been marked by the pen of a military writer who had accurately studied the genuine and ancient principles of Roman disci- pline The enervated soldiers abandoned their own and the public

defense ; and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered as the imme- diate cause of the downfall of the empire. 2

The moralists have taken their data largely from the historians, and have pictured the immoral and degenerating influences of luxury in even more vivid and denunciatory terms. Their pages bristle with illustrations tending to show the enervating effects of luxury upon those nations which have waxed strong, flour- ished for a time, and then decayed. Nor are their ringing words confined to any particular country or to any special time. Seneca, Pliny, Plato, Aristotle, the church fathers, the great philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and the modern French moralist M. de Lave- leye have raised their protesting voices against luxury and its attendant evils.

The economist also has spent no little time and labor in dis- cussing the various aspects of luxury and in showing its effects upon the production of wealth. The almost unanimous verdict of the economists has been that from an economic standpoint the expenditure of wealth upon luxuries is a wasteful and unpro- ductive form of consumption. Adam Smith says that the prodigal man tends to beggar himself and impoverish his country, while the frugal man is an economic blessing. John Stuart Mill con- sidered wealth spent upon pleasures and luxuries as consumed unproductively. Other writers of less note in the realm of eco- nomics have done little more than echo the sentiments of these two great masters of economic thought. The following


 * Ibid., Vol. I, p. 68. Vol. Ill, pp. 129, 130.