Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/849

 ETHICS OF WEALTH 835

possible the highest self-realization of the individual and the race, and those which militate against such a happy issue. Such being the case, it is pertinent to ask whether there is any standard by which those luxuries essentially ennobling and refining may be separated from those which are degrading. Obviously we should not agree were we to ask ourselves what luxuries are of most worth in the development of the race and what ones are most vicious. It is difficult to formulate general rules on any subject, and particularly in this, where so much depends upon circum- stances. Obviously the well-trained individual judgment will be a better guide than any precepts. It does seem, however, that, as a general rule, those luxuries which are comparatively durable have an advantage over those which are merely transitory. This is certainly true from an economic standpoint. Adam Smith hints at this distinction in discussing productive and unproduc- tive labor when he says :

A man of fortune, for example, may either spend his revenue in a profuse and sumptuous table, and in maintaining a great number of menial servants, and a multitude of dogs and horses ; or, contenting himself with a frugal table and few attendants, he may lay out the greater part of it in adorning his house or his country villa, in useful or ornamental buildings, in useful or ornamental furniture, in collecting books, statues, pictures. . . .*

Here, then, is a clear distinction between that which is dur- able and that which is transitory, evidently to the advantage of the former. In case of the expenditure of money upon the more durable forms of luxury there remains something perma- nent to cultivate the taste and to develop the aesthetic sense. The Walters' Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington illustrate this point. They create an appreciation of the beautiful and tend to interest persons of wealth in these more durable and refining forms of luxury. Doing this, they check, as Ruskin has shown, the wasteful and often immoral expenditure of wealth upon perishable luxuries. Silently and effectively they aid the economist, the moralist, and the satirist in their crusades against luxury in its more objectionable forms,

T See Wealth of Nations, Book II, chap, iii ; see alsoMAcCuNN, Ethics of Citizen- ship, pp. 213 sq.