Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/35

Rh in physical exercises and acts of courage, at least as much vigor and resolution as men of other social grades. Civilized peoples have during the past three centuries obtained most brilliant advantages over barbarians. If civilization is threatened, it is much less by the taste for elegance in living than by the poison of certain doctrines, and by a mental and moral dilettanteism that has no necessary relation, in its adepts, to an enlightened taste for objects of luxury.

When we read most of the criticisms that have been uttered against luxury, even by great writers, we find that they are inspired by a thought as inexact as it is superficial; by the mistake of supposing that the superfluous luxuries enjoyed by the wealthy are acquired at the expense of the necessaries of the poor. If no fine shoes were made, it is said, everybody would have good shoes; but all men in civilized countries have got their good shoes without the manufacture of fine boots for men and women being diminished. Again, we hear, would the world not be better off if, instead of ten or twenty thousand objects of luxury, ten or twenty thousand useful things were made?

The question can not be put in this way. The conception of social activity that lies at the bottom of this reasoning is false. It regards social activity as a factor fixed once and forever; and it imagines that if we take five hundred thousand days' work for superfluities, this five hundred thousand days' work will be lacking for necessaries. We should ask whether man's productive capacity, his inventive force, his energy in working, and the progress of the arts and sciences have not been kept up and extended by the constant seeking for a more embellished life and the satisfaction of more diversified wants; if a society that does not condemn and proscribe luxury has not, even in the matter of common objects, an infinitely greater productive force than a society that does condemn and proscribe it. We should inquire if the taste for novelty and change that characterizes luxury does not contribute to keep the general spirit of a society more on the alert, more ready to institute better industrial conditions and make discoveries and improvements; and if, on the other hand, a society always held down to the same kind of monotonous, insipid life would be as productive, even in agriculture and the common arts, as another, excited to incessant activity by luxurious tastes.

Industrial progress and the extension of general wealth make common many articles once regarded as luxuries. Sugar, spices, and coffee were once luxuries; drinking glasses, window panes and curtains, and carpets. Watches and clocks were grand luxuries till they could be made for eight or ten dollars. In articles of clothing, shirts, stockings, shoes, pocket-handkerchiefs (even in Montaigne's time), ribbons, and lace were regarded as